Rain on the City
by mirasolabeille
Summary: Dean puts himself back together after Emily breaks their engagement.
1. Chapter 1

RAIN ON THE CITY

CHAPTER ONE

The train that Dean Priest boarded in Moncton was a local. If a train was a snake, Dean thought, this one had just eaten a water buffalo and was none too pleased to be moving at all; it belched and shuffled its way southwest toward Boston tiny town by tiny town, pausing with gasping, side-heaving relief to disgorge and receive passengers at twenty-mile intervals.

Dean, accustomed to frequent travel, usually planned ahead and booked a sleeper compartment for such journeys. But there was nothing usual about this trip, and he was too desperate to put Canada behind him even to wait six more hours for a faster, more comfortable train. First class it was, then: softer seats and better food than the noisy, crowded coach cars, but no way to elevate his bad leg without propping his foot up on the opposite seat, and that he could not bring himself to do.

No gentleman would.

"The human body craves symmetry," one of his doctors had told him, back when he was young and hopeful enough to go looking for cures from anyone who would promise them to him. "It seeks balance at every turn, and will cripple itself again and again in search of it."

What that meant, of course, was that the thigh muscle of his longer leg was never fully extended while striding, not even when Dean wore the built-up shoe that particular doctor had recommended for the shorter leg. It bunched and cramped in protest, and - when forced to immobility for any period of time - knotted itself into a hard, defiant lump of shrieking nerve endings just above his knee.

There was another spot just like it below his shoulder blade on the opposite side. Yes, balance in all things, he thought, and smiled grimly to himself. For every action, an opposite reaction. For every moment of stolen joy, a lurking abyss of retributive agony.

 _Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes,_ wrote Rumi the Ascetic in one of his flowery Persian sermons. _If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed._

Dean wondered what Rumi had to say about broken engagements. Not much, he imagined. Being an Ascetic had its advantages.

Nearly to Bar Harbor. Sixteen more hours to Boston.

Sixteen hours farther away. What matter how slowly he was moving, if he was moving in the right direction?

He braced himself against the juddering side of the train, gritted his teeth against the pain, and tried to sleep.

* * *

Boston was humid and crowded and smelled of coal exhaust, body odor, and day-old fish. Dean managed to winch himself to his feet and descend the steps from the train to the platform without assistance, but stumbled after three or four paces and would have gone to his knees if a nearby porter hadn't caught him by the elbow.

"Steady, sir," the porter said, his gaze skating over Dean's raised shoulder and then rapidly away again. "Let me help you with your bag."

Dean took the help. His knee was screaming. The rest of him was numb.

It was a trick he had mastered back at school, for moments in which his body called unwelcome attention to itself. The trick was to leave the imperfect flesh to its own devices and let the soul float free of it, hovering, disconnected. Whatever humiliation the body endured, it could endure by itself; it would not drag the rest of him down to degradation along with it. Even now, the curious and pitying eyes that followed his limping progress through the station: those eyes, he told himself, were only looking at the wreck of his carcass. They did not see him.

No one ever saw him.

The porter flagged down a hansom and shoehorned Dean and his valise neatly into the back seat. Dean dropped coins into his hand, keeping his face averted. The sooner the porter ceased to exist, the sooner he could pretend that the near-fall on the platform had never happened.

"My bag to the Parker House," he told the driver. "I have a room reserved."

"And you as well, sir? To the hotel?"

"No," said Dean, making a decision, and gave him an address.

* * *

Boston's Chinatown district was a puny, fledgling David to San Francisco's Goliath – just a few thousand workers who'd come over to make shoes during the factory strike in North Adams, thirty years ago, and never left. Jolting past the laundries and noodle shops on Harrison Avenue in the back of the cab, Dean saw men but next to no Chinese women. The Americans had seen to that in typical xenophobic hysteria, with their Chinese Exclusion Act and their endless series of immigration raids.

No matter, for his purposes, anyway: in any community where there were working men and no marriageable women, there were prostitutes. Most for the workers, a few select better ones for their employers. Sweet-smelling, soft-voiced comforts to remind them of home, to resign them to their exile.

Liu - the queen of them all - did a very brisk business.

"This corner," he told the bemused driver. "No need to wait."

You will not fall, he said to himself, white-knuckling the handholds on the outside of the hansom and fumbling for more coins. You will put one foot on the ground, and then the other in front of it, and then the other again, and it doesn't matter that you are in pain because you are going to the one place in this godforsaken city that can make - it - stop.

He was at the corner, hissing through his teeth with every dragging, unlovely step but still upright. He was at the red carved door with the green awning.

And here, yes, here was Liu, elegant in a grey silk gown that proud Elizabeth Murray would not have been ashamed to wear to Sunday service, with perhaps another faint line or two at the corners of her eyes but still graceful, still smiling, flawless skin, pure Mandarin profile, offering him her arm and pulling him through the silver brocade door-curtains into her jewel box of a parlor.

"Mr. Priest," she said, taking his measure in a single sweeping glance. "You have been away from us for a long time."

"Travel," said Dean shortly. This was not enough of an explanation – Liu had introduced him to the jeweler where he'd bought Emily's emerald, in a gesture that at the time had seemed very much like a ritual farewell – but she nodded after a moment, took his coat and hat, and hung them in a rosewood armoire.

"We can converse later," she said, "after you are more comfortable. For the moment, I will have Xiaoling show you to the Blue Room."

* * *

It might have been a mistake to come here, Dean thought.

The Blue Room was hung with shadowy slate-colored silk and lit with candle-lanterns. A fountain splashed in the corner. He leaned heavily on an upholstered arm-chair and tried not to look at Xiaoling, kneeling to remove his boots.

Xiaoling – 'little comforter'. Almost too apt a name; probably she had chosen it, or had it chosen for her. He wondered what her parents had called her.

She was more slightly built than … well, than. And her eyes were dark instead of smoke-grey. But she was young and soft-skinned and folded into a shimmering loose garment the color of moonlight, her hair a shining fall of blue-black, and the sight of her small sure hands unfastening his buttons lit dangerous fires inside him. He was relieved when she stepped away for a moment to the table, then took his arm to draw him with her.

"Sit," she said, pushing him into the chair. The sound of her voice – soft, tinged with the musical tones of Canton, no hint of arch, familiar, heartbreaking impishness – shattered what remained of the mirage he'd conjured; he blinked and sat, and allowed her to lift each leg in turn and settle it inside a bucket of hot water strewn with sharp green-smelling herbs. A length of silk drifted over his lap – more for his own modesty, Dean knew, than for hers.

Next was an herbal tisane in a thick stoneware mug without a handle. He had drunk it before – it was chokingly bitter, but carved out a thin layer of distance between himself and his pain.

 _No opium,_ he had told Liu the first time, years ago. _Never any opium; I will not lose the only part of my poor self that I still value to poppy worship._

This was not as effective. But it let him breathe again.

He closed his eyes and listened to the plashing fountain behind him, and only jerked a little when Xiaoling came back with muslin bags of heated dry rice to pack over the aching muscles of his thighs. A moment later, he caught a whiff of strongly mentholated herbal ointment as she moved around behind him, and groaned aloud as her hard little thumbs found the sensitive spots at either side of his nape.

This was a luxury, certainly, but also more pain than pleasure – the punishing pressure of her elbow against the stubborn knot of muscle in his back; the insistent repeated drag of knuckles over the twitching, protesting soles of his feet; her murmured litany of apology ( _sorry, sorry, so sorry_ ) as she dug her iron fingers into the shrieking mass of dysfunction in his leg and forced the twisted tendons to release. Hands on his hump, even, matter-of-fact and unhurried in their hard rhythmic massage.

Perhaps she was truly not disturbed by his deformities. More likely, he was simply paying her well enough to pretend.

Dean longed to escape into his mental haven, but every twinge of sensation, welcome or not, pulled him back into visceral awareness of his damaged body. He fought surrender as long as he could, then – when exhaustion and sheer tactile overload claimed him – began, silently, to weep.

One blessing there, he told himself, and only one. If most of these tears were for Emily, who would know it?

* * *

It went on and on. The tears dried, eventually, leaving a hollow and not unwelcome lassitude in their place. Her touch hurt him less, now, but felt – _more_ , as though her hands had scoured off a layer of epidermis, leaving him vulnerable and newborn. Dean scrabbled in his mind for the door that would let him escape, and found it too heavy to open. For this moment, for better or worse, he was anchored – all of him – inside this sea of sensation.

Xiaoling peeled the silk back over his groin. He felt her small hard hands vibrating gently on his bare thighs. When he opened his eyes, she was staring up at him from between his legs, eyebrows lifted in mute inquiry: yes, or no?

Sometimes, in the past, he had said yes. To her, or at least others like her. But not for more than a year now, not since he'd thought –

Well. Best not to dwell on it.

He wavered for an agonizing instant on the edge of temptation. That black hair, that slim creamy silhouette against the candles. Warm and wet and attentive, drawing the poison of his grief away from him a ribbon of sensation at a time, the way a spool of thread unwinds when you hold it up and let gravity take the loose end.

A moment of pleasure amid all this despair. A light to hold against the darkness.

He could thread that shiny hair through his hands, touch that satin skin. He could pretend …

"No, thank you," he said, swallowing the high tide of his lust. "I have everything I need at the moment."

A lie, of course.

* * *

He paid her fee. After only a moment of hesitation, he sorted through his clothes until he found his waistcoat, and dug into the tiny inner pocket for the emerald ring. Her eyes widened when he dropped it into her hand.

"Perhaps it will help you to go home sooner," he said in his broken Cantonese. "There may be people there who love you."

Unspoken: _I envy you that._

Liu summoned a hansom cab for him and slipped a neatly wrapped packet of the analgesic tea into his hands. He did not offer to answer the questions banked in her deep gaze, and she did not pry. Another advantage of dealing with professionals.

"Where do you go next?" she asked lightly as she helped him into his coat. "Is it usually Egypt, this time of year?"

"Not this time," he said, though truthfully he'd thought no further than where he was standing now. "Europe, I think. Italy, perhaps."

"Come and see us again," she said, "when you return. And safe travels to you."

Dean nodded. His leg really did feel very much better.

" _Xiexie_ ," he said, and – giving in to impulse – leaned in and kissed her flawless cheek.

Who knew? Maybe this time it really was goodbye.

You could never tell, with human beings.


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

He had to wait two weeks – nothing, in the grand scheme of world travel – for the next ship to Italy. He could have taken an earlier departure to Marseilles, but the thought of France made his teeth clench. Paris was Teddy Kent's playground now, not his. Why remind himself that Esmerelda never looked at her adoring Hunchback, that his heroic fixation on her led him only to a pauper's grave?

Victor Hugo. Sentimental trash. But even so.

Naples, then, on the SS Vancouver. Shocking what one paid for a single cabin in first class, but that was no matter.

It could be worse, he told himself. You could be a cripple without money. What then?

No leisure, no travel, no distractions. No books.

Books compensated for the lack of almost everything else. And then ... well, and then there was the Parker House breakfast, palatial and British down to the kippers and the kedgeree, and improved further by the addition of their famous, eponymous rolls, hot and buttery from the oven with honey glistening stickily in their deep central creases.

He would miss this breakfast. But then, was there not always another new small pleasure to replace the one left behind?

His trunks were packed and waiting in his flat in Shrewsbury. He sent for them, and they were delivered to the hotel a few days later. What fortune, he thought, that he had not yet unfolded their contents into the charming cedar closets of the Disappointed House.

Thinking of the House hurt him. It was as if the knife in his gut shifted, withdrew, changed angle, and drove in again, just a millimeter away from the first wound. A distinct pain, but tied to the other.

All those years, he thought, his lips twisting, those long years-in-waiting spent breezing through the world as if it were one big open-air bazaar, pausing only to pick up any little trinket that made him think of her. Anything to please her, anything to make her eyes shine and her lips part; anything he could squirrel away as a reminder of her, hope against hope against hope. The House was a shrine to his decade of patient, wholehearted longing. And for what?

 _I_ _can't marry you, Dean. I don't love you_.

* * *

He wandered through the city, paging through books that he didn't want to read, looking through windows at goods he had no intention of buying, dining at this place and that though the food tasted like wet newsprint in his mouth. He walked for miles, forcing his leg to bend and flex and take his weight – the best of the doctors had all agreed on that point, that he was better off moving it than keeping it still. And then, four days before his scheduled departure, he held a shop door open for a woman on her way out to the street, and found himself caught in an unexpected fox-fur embrace.

"Dean Priest!" she said. "Darling, how long have you been in the city? And why ever didn't you call on me first thing?"

Dazed by a bracing, rosemary-sharp drift of her Acqua di Regina perfume, he looked up. "Oh," he said, flushing with surprise. "Mrs. Gardner. How wonderful to see you again."

"Isabella, dear," she said, catching his arm at the elbow. "I insist. Now, don't even think of trying to escape, I won't have it. You must come to the house and have dinner with me; I am entirely on my own this evening. The boys are all away at school, the Symphony Guild has moved their meeting to Friday, and I suppose you heard about Jack."

"I did, yes," Dean said. "I am so sorry for your loss."

"Yes, well," she said. "We had a lovely time, didn't we, as long as it lasted? Now come along, that's a good fellow, here's my car."

She was an imperious, strong-jawed lady in her middle sixties. Dean had seen the portraits – well, the Singer Sargent, anyway, the best of the lot – and even in her youth, she had been more vivid than beautiful: square of face, snapping of eye, vigorous of opinion. They had met on some steamship or other, if he recalled it correctly, perhaps ten years previous – he on one of his directionless intercontinental wanderings, she and her husband bound for Italy to buy more artifacts for their house in the Back Bay. He remembered long, circular arguments about Dante and Milton, about Botticelli, about the Hokusai _Manga_ , sheaves of unframed paintings by unknown hopefuls stacked like old newspapers in her cabin, glittering diamanté luncheons.

She was unlike any rich society lady of a certain age he'd ever met: utterly without self-importance, devoted to her collections, excited by ideas and by art and indifferent to the fashions that she subsequently ended up setting. She had never seemed even to notice his hump or his limp. At the time, he had thought her a beatified, perfected version of what his Great-Aunt Nancy might have been.

He hadn't supposed that she remembered him at all.

* * *

The car was a gleaming ivory Mercedes limousine – "only bought this year," she said, rubbing her hands gleefully together; "a shocking beast, is it not? The boys all want it for joyriding, but only Mr. Mackenzie is trusted with the key. Now, you must see the house. You remember that Jack and I were talking about building it, the summer we crossed to Italy with you. The old one had been added onto so many times it was a patchwork, and still it wouldn't hold all of the lovely things we found."

Dean did remember that conversation – feigned reluctance on Jack's part, laughing insistence on Isabella's. "You wanted a palazzo," he said. "Like – what was the place in Venice? The one you loved so much?"

"Clever boy," she said, patting his cheek. "Good memory. The Barbaro, on the Grand Canal. The most lovely place I've ever seen or ever will. And – look! Didn't I get the feel of it right? No canals, of course, but the Fens are right outside."

"Astonishing," Dean said, and meant it. "Exactly like a Venetian palazzo, only –"

"Shiny and new," she said. "No centuries of patina. But give it time!"

* * *

The house was four stories, built around a central courtyard garden that took his breath with its lushness. "Glassed in at the top," Isabella said. "Of course they wouldn't, would they, in Venice. But one must make some allowances for Boston winters."

"How can you bear ever to leave it?" Dean asked, fingering a glossy leaf of the potted lemon tree nearest him. She smiled.

"If Jack were still here, I probably never would," she said. "But –" She broke off, shrugging. "Even a beautiful place is just a place. Come now, we must see the Titian before the light goes. And my Japanese woodcuts – seventeenth century, so lively and detailed, they could walk off the page. And oh – the painted leather panels! Jack and I collected them for years, from a dozen different places. France, Italy, the Netherlands. Enough to paper a whole room; I call it the Veronese Room because of the mural on the ceiling. That ceiling was built two years ago in Milan, expressly to house that painting; I had the whole thing brought over and installed. An extraordinary piece; sometimes when I am in the house alone, I lie down on the floor in that room and look at it for hours."

Her old fingers plucked at his sleeve; her eyes were bright and knowing and determined. "Come now, dear," she said, "you look peaked and melancholy, like summer has stolen something from you, and when I feel that way, I simply must look at art. It is art that saves us, you know."

Dean stole a last longing glance at the garden, smiled, and allowed himself to be led away.

At least, he thought, there is an elevator.

* * *

"It would take days to see it all," he said finally, after three hours. "Everywhere the eye turns, it is dazzled."

"Very like Europe in that regard, is it not?" She hooked her arm through his. "And now, dinner. Veal, I believe."

It was indeed veal, though before it came there were courses of tomato aspic and stuffed cucumbers and tiny roasted quail. "I am fond of game birds," Isabella said. "I once saved our entire traveling party from a meal of garlic and offal in Morocco, by explaining that we were Americans, and that Americans like to eat partridges on Wednesdays." She twinkled at him from over her wine glass. "And my tutors said I would never find a use for Spanish, more fools they. How are your languages, Dean?"

"French and Italian," he said, "enough to get by. Less German – I never took to it, somehow. Some rudimentary Chinese and Japanese – speaking only; I struggle with the written language." He laughed. "It would have been the garlic and offal for me, I'm afraid; I have no Spanish at all."

"I wish I was getting on that ship with you," she said, suddenly pensive. "I have another trip planned for next spring – I didn't show you the wing on the third floor where I intend to put my chapel. There are rumors that I might acquire a very fine French Gothic stained glass window from the eleventh century that used to hang in a cathedral north of Paris. But the weather will be finer in May, and I have friends set to travel with me then."

"Is it so hard to wait for May?"

"It is hard to watch any ship sailing away," Isabella said. "Who knows what awaits on the other side of the ocean?"

They had lemon ices for dessert, and coffee in the Italian style, thick as sludge in the tiny round cups.

"I mean to leave it to the city when I die, you know," she said. "The house, the art. Everything. The boys will do quite well without it, and I won't have my life's work parceled out and sold off at auction." She savored her espresso. "I shall write a codicil to the bequest; nothing can be moved or sold or added, once I've breathed my last. And anything I don't want the public to see before I go, I shall consign to the flames."

"A legacy," Dean said, understanding. "Proof you were here."

"I will be remembered as I choose to be," said Isabella, fiercely. "Not as just another rich woman in a famous man's painting."

"Or the heroine of a novel?" teased Dean. This was intimate territory; he would never have had the courage to mention it without the second glass of wine. Isabella eyed him narrowly.

"Cheeky," she said, but without heat. "But yes. Frank Crawford may have tried to capture me in those pages, but he did not succeed. And he _knows_ he did not – otherwise, why would he have killed off my character?"

"There are a thousand ways to die," said Dean, barely realizing that he spoke aloud. Isabella said nothing for a long moment.

"No," she said finally. Her eyes were faraway but not, he thought, sad, not exactly. "No, there aren't. There's only one. And it hasn't happened to either one of us yet."

* * *

It was nearly midnight when he kissed her cheek and bade her farewell in the cool stone entry of her fascinating new-old house. She smiled at him and slipped an envelope into his hand.

"An introduction, of sorts," she said. "Go to Venice. Stay with the Curtises, in the Barbaro villa."

"I couldn't possibly impose on you or your friends."

"Imposition, nothing," she said. "Quite the contrary. It will soothe me to think of you in those lovely rooms, sunning the darkness from your soul."

Dean stared at her.

"It is so obvious, then," he said, "that I am in despair?"

"That you are lonely," corrected Isabella, "and tempted to succumb to solitude rather than fight it any longer." She squeezed his hand. "Keep fighting," she said. "And mind that you send me letters. I may be an old woman, but I still enjoy occasional correspondence with handsome young men."


	3. Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

* * *

"Reading again, Mr. Priest?" said the wife of the American lumber magnate, shepherding her two daughters into the USS Vancouver's ship library. "How _intellectual_ you are. Girls, isn't he intellectual? What wise words do you have for us today?"

Dean, stifling a sigh, glanced up from his novel. Three pairs of identical round china-blue eyes goggled back at him from beneath heavily trimmed straw summer hats.

The thin daughter was so overbalanced, he thought snidely, the weight of that bonnet might snap her skinny neck if she turned her head too quickly. The fatter daughter looked like a mushroom wrapped in plaid grosgrain. Madame Lumber Magnate's own hat was trimmed on either side with dyed pigeon wings that her milliner had likely sold her as bird-of-paradise, and looked like a discarded prop from a budget production of _Götterdammerung_. He expected her to burst into 'The Ride of the Valkyries' at any moment.

They were still staring. Three days of this – half the length of the voyage – and they were _still staring._

 _See the cripple. See the cripple read._

There was no help for it; he was going to have to be rude.

"Gustave Flaubert," he said. "From November, an early novella. 'I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.'"

"How _lovely_ ," enthused Madame Lumber Magnate. "Such elevated thoughts! And what, pray tell, is the book about?"

"A young man is initiated into the joys of the flesh by a more experienced lady," said Dean flatly, "in matter of fact a courtesan, then comes to regret it." He paused for effect. "In the end, he dies."

The eyes of Daughters Thin and Fat rounded. Madame Lumber Magnate flushed brick-red.

"I see," she said. " _French_. We will leave you to it, then. Girls, _now_."

Dean watched their disappearing backs – twitching bustles, bobbing oversized heads – with what felt very much like satisfaction, then turned back to his Flaubert.

A snort of muffled laughter broke his concentration.

"Oh, well done," said a voice. Youngish. Female. American, but with a private-school patina. He turned to consider its source.

He didn't know why he hadn't noticed her come into the library. Perhaps she'd come in behind the Lumber Magnates. Perhaps she'd been there in the corner chair all along.

 _Bluestocking_ , he thought, which usually carried with it _spinster_ and _suffragist_ , though this woman looked rather too fresh-faced and merry to wear either of those grim titles easily. She was wearing her brown hair in a coronet of braids – the overall effect was of a style more efficient than artistic – and her blue morning dress was cut in the roomy, flowing Reform silhouette. She had papers on her lap and an ink stain on her finger.

The ink stain gave him a moment's pause. Emily had such a mark on her forefinger, though it had lightened almost to nothing during the year of their engagement.

"I beg your pardon," he said, opting for chilly politesse. "I had been considering the most efficient means of detaching those three for days now. But I didn't mean for anyone else to overhear my lack of courtesy."

Her eyes – a lovely clear shade of light brown – laughed at him. "You needn't revert to platitudes on my behalf," she said. "It was an utter rout, expertly delivered; you should be proud of it. And I enjoyed it every bit as much as you did."

He expected a second salvo – it was what women did; they prolonged conversation – but she turned back to her papers and pen, leaving him to consider her profile.

How old was she? he wondered. Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?

And what was she writing?

* * *

Madame Lumber Magnate and her brood of unlovely splinters pointedly ignored him at dinner. Dean countered by pretending not to notice the snub, and instead made himself more charming than usual, directing his conversation toward the two young British men at their table. Not that he particularly wanted to talk to them. One of them was a Harold - second son of a gambling-addicted viscount - and the other an Oliver – heir to a worthless entailed title and a crumbling pile of stone somewhere in Sussex. Beyond the names, they were interchangeable in their tedium.

Still, they were precisely the sort of impoverished, weak-chinned scion of the British aristocracy that the Daughters Lumber were on this voyage to ensnare. Dean knew he shouldn't interfere – trading titles for money was serious business for all parties involved – but the petty pleasure to be gained by impeding these particular shipboard romances was too great not to indulge.

"Brandy?" he suggested near the end of the poached pears. Harold and Oliver, who had been trapped in the parlor the previous evening with the Lumbers and their album of holiday postcards, agreed with alacrity. Behind their backs, Madame Lumber was unable to suppress a grimace of frustration.

"It would be a great pity not to have some entertainment," she said with hauteur, "after you gentlemen have refreshed yourselves. Minnie plays the pianoforte beautifully, and Margaret has been praised for her singing voice. The other ladies may contribute as well, of course, if they care to take part." She sent Dean what she probably thought was a cutting glance. "Good wholesome music is so _restorative_ to the human spirit."

"So is brandy, madam," Dean said smoothly. "But by all means, let us follow our libations with a musicale." He smiled at her unpleasantly. "I am sure that Minnie and Margaret will not fail to meet the expectations you have raised for them."

* * *

"What a horrifying old tart," said Oliver, lifting his tumbler of brandy. "And the daughters. Nightmares both."

"The eternal problem," said Harold, a trifle unsteadily. He was on his second generous glass, and beginning to slur. "A compromise will be necessary at some point, of course, to hold body and soul together. But can one be honestly expected to descend _that_ far?"

"That depends," Oliver said, gloomily. "How badly does your manor house need a new roof?"

They both seemed to have forgotten Dean's presence, which suited him to the ground; he sipped his brandy and said nothing. The first-class men's smoking room was warm and quiet – leather chairs, oil-rubbed wood, the faint ingrained scent of pipe tobacco, high vaulted skylights beyond which shimmered the cool and silent stars. In the opposite corner, an old man slept, a newspaper tented over his lap, his outdated top hat next to him on the side table.

Harold drained the second glass.

"I'll tell you who I'd rather have, if I had to pick from the ship's roster," he announced. "Miss Whatsit."

"Who?"

"You know. Brainy. Just a bit on the plump side. American, but not like those other two." He considered his empty glass owlishly. "Scribbles."

"You mean Miss Lowell?" Oliver said. "Isn't she a bit on the shelf? Must be twenty-five if she's a day."

"Who cares?" Harold set the glass down with a clang. "She's jolly enough; we'd rub along all right, I daresay. Buckets of money. And then there's the family, too – quite respectable even if she is from the new side of the pond. Boston Brahmins, what."

"Lowell," said Dean thoughtfully. "I am acquainted with a socialite from Boston named Amy Lowell; she travels nearly as often as I do. She has aspirations of being a writer, I think, though she must be in her early thirties now and so far hasn't published anything."

"No, no," said Harold, shaking his head. "I know Amy too. That's her older cousin, and no use trying to unite the bloodlines _there_ ; she's a fervent Sapphic. This one's named Rosalind, and fancies herself a composer, if you can believe it. Studied in Paris and everything." He grinned. "So much the better, I say. Let her stay in Paris; I can still spend her money in London."

"Perhaps she'll favor us with a song at the ladies' musicale," suggested Oliver, then groaned. "Blast it, the musicale. If we don't present ourselves forthwith, the old bat will be knocking down the door."

* * *

Minnie and Margaret regaled the assembled company with selections from _Die Fledermaus_ , in English translation. It was everything Dean had imagined it would be.

They garnered their tepid applause and retired, simpering, to the front row. The audience, restive but resigned, suffered further through a breathy recitation of Keats, an indifferently played Clementi sonatina, and some dismal folk songs from one of the soggier peninsulas of the British Isles, intoned through the lady singer's nose and accompanied on an ill-tuned lap-harp.

"Miss Lowell plays," said Harold with every evidence of enthusiasm, as the last twang of the harp died away. Dean saw Madame Lumber grimace in a most unladylike manner; it made her look more operatic than ever. "And writes her own music, to boot! Give us a number, do."

Dean was reminded suddenly, viscerally, of Emily – a very young Emily – raging about being asked to write a funeral ode to order. Rosalind Lowell had something of the same look in her eyes now. But she was not Emily, not sensitive and sixteen; she smiled and said something prettily self-deprecating and came to the front of the room.

She had dressed for dinner, he noticed, in a gown of bronze taffeta. The color suited her better than her blue day dress, though this gown too was cut in the shapeless Rational style and floated away from her in layers without revealing the contour of her body. The ink stain was still on her finger.

"I do write songs," she said, "but I shall not sing any of them for you tonight, as it is never my own voice for which I write and, inexpert as they are, I should not do them justice. But songwriters are forever reading poetry, searching for new words to waken melodies within them, so perhaps I can appease you with a recitation of one of my discoveries."

She swept a loose tendril of hair back from her face, seeming not to notice that Minnie and Margaret were giggling together five paces in front of her. "The book from which this excerpt is taken was written by a Japanese poet named Yone Noguchi, and was published in London only last year. It is called 'Eastern Seas'."

She recited simply, in a low clear voice, her face turned into the light and smoothed from merriment into a serenity that Dean found strangely compelling:

There is nothing like the moon-night

When I raise my face from the land of loss

Unto the golden air, and calmly learn

How perfect it is to grow still as a star.

There is nothing like the moon-night

When I walk upon the freshest dews,

And amid the warmest breezes,

With all the thought of God

And all the bliss of man, as Adam

Not yet driven from Eden, and to whom

Eve was not yet born. What a bird

Dreams in the moonlight is my dream:

What a rose sings is my song.

* * *

"Wasn't that … queer," Dean heard Madame Lumber say, as the company dispersed toward their staterooms. "Imagine one of those heathens from Japan writing a poem about God. I had no idea such a thing was even allowed, did you?"

He remained behind in his chair for a moment or two, smiling to himself. Rosalind Lowell paused by his chair, her eyes as guarded now as they had been open and laughing this morning.

"You find something amusing, Mr. Priest?"

"I know a bit about Yone Noguchi," Dean said. "But that speaks more to my own love of arcane literature and tolerance for subversive politics than anything else; I spent some time in San Francisco, a few years ago, and am acquainted with the crowd he runs in. How did you come to know his writing?"

The corner of her mouth twitched, and the light came back into her eyes. "If I say that we have friends in common, will you scorn me as a fallen woman?"

"If I dared do such a thing," returned Dean, "I have no doubt that you would brush off my scorn like dust from the hem of your gown. What use have you for my opinion?"

"That depends," said Rosalind, smiling at him. "Is your opinion useful?"

This felt, thought Dean, very much like the beginnings of a flirtation. He resolved to kill it at the root.

"Young Harold means to marry you, you know," he said. "He spent the majority of our after-dinner sojourn in the smoking lounge swilling brandy and extolling your innumerable virtues. So if you are a revolutionary and rabble-rouser with Sapphic tendencies, like all of Noguchi's other friends, you should let him down now before he develops more of a _tendresse_ than he is already nursing."

Her smile did not dim.

"Let us make one thing clear between us," she said. "Not wanting to marry Harold does not make me a rabble-rouser." A pause, a flush, a twinkle. "It doesn't make me a Sapphic, either. Just in case you were wondering. Good night, Mr. Priest."

"Good night," said Dean to the vanishing swirl of bronze taffeta.

He was surprised to find himself smiling all the way back to his stateroom.


	4. Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

* * *

 _Cook's Tourist Handbook,_ the old 1884 edition that Dean kept tucked into his luggage and had read a thousand times, described Naples as "ill-built, ill-paved, ill-lighted, ill-drained, ill-watched, ill-governed, and ill-ventilated." Dean found it one of the most beautiful cities he had ever seen, a gleaming mother-of-pearl amphitheater cradling and rising from a protected bay of such exquisite and intense azure that to look too long at it hurt the eyes.

That was from the ship. Once on land, it became apparent what _Cook's_ had been complaining about: the city was noisy, crowded, and in the midst of a monthlong railway strike.

"No one knows how long it will last," wrote Dean to Isabella. "I am told that if I can get to Rome, perhaps the trains in the northern part of the country are unaffected. I plan to hire a car, if I can find a trustworthy driver with a conveyance that is up to the journey."

"Everyone in the city is talking about politics: Giolitti is back in the Prime Minister's palazzo, after being unceremoniously ousted during his first presidency, and is promising to expand the economy and the infrastructure. We shall see if he is more successful this time around. The Neapolitans do not seem unduly hopeful; they have heard too many promises from too many politicians, and have not seen enough changes that benefit them. Nor does the new government have the support of the Pope, who is still smarting from the loss of Rome and the city-states, and refuses to recognize Italy as a unified nation. So we shall see where the wind takes them."

"Most of the passengers traveling on the _Vancouver_ boarded another boat, after barely enough time on land to be fleeced into buying souvenirs of carved coral and volcanic glass (the latter almost certain to be imitation, I dare say), and are presently traversing the Mediterranean toward Nice. I wish them – well, some of them, anyway – sea fever and pirates. The last few days of the passage were rather trying."

"I spent my first afternoon in the lovely Cappella Sansevero, in the center of the old city, to calm my travel-wounded spirit. As many beautiful works of art as that space contains – more than thirty, I should think, if you count the mural on the ceiling and the inlaid labyrinth under your feet – it is difficult to look at anything except Sanmartino's _Veiled Christ._ I am all but indifferent to the myth of the Passion, but even I cannot look at this man under his misty marble shroud, the marks of his torture still apparent on his body and his face taut with pain even in death, and not feel myself suffused with sympathy and shame. There are shackles and pliers and a crown of thorns carved at his feet, so realistic in their barbarism that you might prick your finger upon one of the points. As for the myth that the sculptor was shown how to transmute cloth into marble by the alchemists – that the veil is made of magic, not skill with the chisel – I almost believe it myself. One feels that one could reach out and move it aside with one's hand, it is so thin and finely draped."

" I came away from the chapel feeling all the things that great art makes one feel – humbled and small and yet glorified by having been so close to something so beautiful. And famished, so I found a pizzeria and stuffed myself with one of those extraordinary melted-cheese flatbreads the Neapolitans do so well and then, for dessert, a pair of enormous _sfogliatelle_ – one in your honor, and one for myself. I expected to be felled immediately by indigestion, but apparently I have built up my tolerance for heavy Italian pastry until it no longer has any power over me."

"I plan to spend the next few days wandering the city. I may hire a driver to take me out to Pompeii for the weekend; I have seen it before, but continue to be moved by that strange, dead place, calcified in the space between one breath and another. As soon as I can arrange suitable private transport, I will begin to make my way north. I hope to be in Venice within the month."

Dean signed the letter, hesitated, then – half-hating himself for indulging the impulse, added a postscript.

"Out of idle curiosity," he wrote, "what can you tell me about a Bostonian woman named Rosalind Lowell? She purports to be a composer; is she merely a dilettante like the rest of us, or is her work really any good?"

He sent the letter before he could change his mind.

* * *

It was not as hard to find a driver as Dean feared it might be. The proprietor of the _albergo_ where he was staying – a charming renovated palazzo on Naples' principal seaward promenade, the Chiaja – had a nephew with a car. Yes, he was a good driver, if a bit fast around the corners at times; yes, he could change his own blowouts; yes, _signor_ , the car was reliable, and only two years old, purchased at a discount from an expatriate _inglese_ who had had to leave the country unexpectedly, and young Gianluca would rather drive it than eat or sleep. And what was the world coming to, asked old Gregorio, his hands open to the heavens to signify his bewilderment, what was the world coming to when young men from respectable families would rather tear about the countryside on four wheels than follow their fathers into the fishing business?

Gianluca was duly hired for the day trip to Pompeii, in what Dean privately thought of as his interview for the longer journey to come. He was eighteen or nineteen and handsome after the Neapolitan style: golden-skinned, chiseled of face, heavy-shouldered, black-browed. His hands were scrubbed clean but stained with motor oil about the finger-joints and under the nails, which Dean felt boded well for his ability to repair anything that might go amiss with his vehicle. He spoke little English, but his Italian was not so heavily slurred with the Neapolitan dialect that Dean could not understand it.

The car, a 1901 Ceirano, had an open bench seat and space behind for luggage. They would have to take cover if it rained, thought Dean, but at least the seat was well-upholstered and had a rolled leather back that supported his shoulders, and when he had hoisted himself into the passenger side, there was room at the floorboards for his leg to extend and flex.

All told, it could be much worse.

* * *

Pompeii – ageless, timeless Pompeii – soothed him in the way it always did. Gianluca, trailing in Dean's limping wake with the lunch basket and the keys to the car, was less impressed.

"This old place," he said with barely veiled contempt. "Stone for a thousand years. What is here to look at but dirt and rocks? What is interesting about dirt?"

"Human beings create in stone because we know it will outlast us," Dean said. "In Pompeii, Vesuvius took over our rôle and became the creator, turning flesh into marble. What better reminder could there be that we are infinitely fragile but also inherently immortal?"

"Rocks," repeated Gianluca, unconvinced. "Italy is full of them."

His true nature emerged, eroding his initial layer of reserve, as he grew more comfortable in Dean's company. By the time their longer journey began, two days after returning from Pompeii – they were to follow the old Via Appia, along which the rail to Rome ran, stopping at each train station they passed until they reached Rome or until the strike ended, whichever occurred first – he clearly considered Dean an old friend. He was accordingly chatty and voluble, steering with one hand while he gestured with the other. Dean, who normally preferred silence in his traveling companions, found him surprisingly good company.

Gianluca was full of questions about America. Was it true, he demanded, that the buildings in New York City were made of glass skins over their metal bones, and that they reached hundreds of feet into the sky? His cousin, who had emigrated two years ago and was now working in a tannery in Brooklyn, had told him in a letter that instead of stairs there were elevators that took you up to the top floors. How did they make the ropes long enough, he wanted to know, and how did they keep them from breaking?

Did Dean go to the moving pictures? Had he seen the movie about the outlaws robbing the train and then being hunted down by the vigilantes, after the scene where the people at the barn dance had made the rich man in the suit dance by shooting at his feet? Did people in America really shoot at you to make you dance?

Had he watched all the way to the final scene where the bad man in the black hat shot straight into the camera until his gun was empty? The look in his eyes, so evil, ah! It chilled the soul. How had the camera kept recording after being shot at so many times, and how badly had the man taking the picture been wounded?

Were cowboys real? Had Dean ever met one? Was _everyone_ in America a cowboy?

He was crestfallen to discover that Dean was from a small city on the eastern coast of Canada, and that he had never so much as _seen_ a cowboy. To cheer him up, Dean told him about his close escape a few years previous from the Righteous and Harmonious Fists of China – leaping, sword-whirling, chanting – and their female counterparts, the Red Lanterns. "They claimed to be able to fly," he said, "and walk on water, and make the bullets fall out of guns by waving their hands in the air. Though personally I never saw them do it."

He spent half an hour telling the story of the Boxer Rebellion: the fleeing missionaries, the Big Swords pursuing them, Dowager Empress Cixi cowering and trapped inside the Forbidden City until she gave into the Fists' demands and declared war on all foreigners. Edward Seymour's British marines pinned down and outnumbered, but fighting free and floating downstream on barges to discover the massive storehouses of the Xigu Arsenal: rice, medical supplies, piles of rifles and ammunition. The Eight-Nation Alliance blanketing China's harbors with ships and guns to force Cixi's surrender.

Gianluca was rapt with attention.

"And Italy also sent troops?" he wanted to know.

"About a hundred."

The bushy black eyebrows shot up. "Only a hundred? A hundred is not very many. Why not more?"

"Perhaps Italy did not have so many missionaries to rescue as everyone else."

"Did Canada send soldiers?"

"No."

"But America did?"

"A few thousand. More than Germany, not as many as France."

"Who sent the most?"

"Japan," said Dean, hoping he was correct.

Gianluca digested this information. "And you saw all this with your own eyes?"

"Some of it, not all. The very beginnings." Honesty compelled Dean to admit, "Before the very bad trouble started, I was well away from there; I read about the big battles later, in the newspapers."

"But you saw the lantern women. You heard them sing their magic songs."

"Yes."

"I suppose," Gianluca said, "that they are just as good as cowboys. If they really can walk on water. And stop the bullets from the guns. Why were you in China? Are you a missionary?"

"Hardly," said Dean. "I just like to travel, that's all."

"Does your wife ever travel with you?"

"What makes you think I have a wife?"

Gianluca's shrug said it all: didn't everyone, eventually?

"I had a fiancée," Dean said, feeling his good mood evaporate. "She ended our engagement not long ago."

"Why?"

"She was too kind to say so," said Dean, "but I believe it was for three very good reasons. I am too old for her, I limp when I walk, and I have a hump on my back."

The words stung him as he said them. Surely, he thought, the fact that they hurt him so much could only mean that they were true.

Gianluca made a dismissive sound.

"You are rich," he said, "and you have seen the world. And you tell the stories that bring up the hair on the back of the neck – you are good at this – so possibly you are good at the stories the women like, as well?"

Surprised, Dean laughed.

"I have my moments, I suppose," he said.

Gianluca smiled. "Then," he said, flexing his gloved fingers on the steering wheel of the Ceirano, "before too very long, there will be another girl." He swept Dean a sideways look. "It is not such a very big hump. I can hardly see it from this angle."

"Thank you," said Dean with heavy irony. Gianluca nodded.

"You are welcome, _signor,"_ he said, adroitly avoiding a pothole. "And now, _allora._ The lantern women, tell me again, for I scarcely can believe it: could they really and truly _fly_?"


	5. Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

When they stopped at Velletri – the southern end of one of the Roman railway lines – they discovered that the strike was over and the trains were running, if not on schedule, at least close to it. Dean, however, found himself reluctant to board. He had been on this line before, and it was not terribly comfortable. Moreover, his bad leg was aching from a week of hard travel and substandard mattresses.

"We'll go on to Tivoli," he told Gianluca, "just for a few days, and recover from our journey at the Acque Albule. Then you can leave me there and return to Napoli; I will be able to make my own way north."

Tivoli was 35 miles farther north. They pressed on; in fine weather like this, even slowing to accommodate the mountainous parts of the road, it was barely three hours' drive. By the dinner hour, they were checked into rooms on the _piano terra_ at a spa hotel near the famous thermal springs.

Gianluca disappeared in search of food, wine and probably women; the order and manner in which he planned to locate and secure those commodities remained, thankfully, a mystery. Dean felt too tired to eat and too travelsore to sleep. He entered the baths, shucked his travel-weary clothing, and sank to his chin in bubbling, sulfurous, gray-green mud.

One day, he thought, I will write a travel memoir and title it _The Invalid Abroad._ It will be just like Twain's famous book, but less amusing, and with more space devoted to the locations and comparative merits of therapeutic baths, hot springs, hotels without stairs, and brothels that specialize in massage. Possibly I shall include a chapter on luxurious, superlative breakfasts. If I can find enough really good ones.

He imagined the polished, unflappable Liu facing down a queue of octogenarians in wheelchairs, all clutching his book and demanding private rooms and herbal tisanes. The thought made him laugh.

Maybe not such a good idea, after all.

The mud was silky with pumice and powdered minerals. Immersed in it, Dean felt weightless and disembodied. Even the pungent old-egg smell of it didn't bother him, after the first dozen or so inhalations. He could feel it drawing the poison of the journey out of his body, enticing him down into head-lolling lassitude. He rotated one shoulder, pulling one arm free – the mud surrendered it with an obscene sucking sound – then let gravity pull it down again and watched its faint wake disappear as the mud flowed around and over it.

The persistent ache at the small of his back lessened and dissipated. It would reinstate itself when he stood up, Dean knew, but for the moment he could pretend that it was gone forever.

He closed his eyes and let himself float.

* * *

Afterwards, an attendant poured warm water over his head – it wasn't really necessary; the mud, after a bit of initial resistance, allowed him to exit and adhered mostly to itself, leaving little to no residue on his body – then, towel wrapped around his waist, walked the few hundred meters to the famous hot spring. The water had the same strong eggy odor as the mud, and was the brilliant, disconcerting blue-green of Atlantic white spruce needles.

Prompted by that color, Dean closed his eyes, leaned back into the warm water, and surrendered to a memory: a laughing, leggy fourteen-year-old Emily tearing through the New Moon spruce barrens with Ilse at her heels, coming up short and pink-cheeked with embarrassment to find him waiting for her in the garden. Her tumbled hair, her rosy face, the improvised bouquet of pine cone-laden spruce boughs in her arms, the way she'd cut her eyes away from his as the hot color rolled over her … he still cherished that image. Probably he always would.

"I came to pay court to Titania," he'd said then, tongue firmly in cheek, "and instead I find a pair of Pucks. Just as well I didn't allow myself to doze, or I might be waking up with donkey's ears."

This salvo sent both Emily and Ilse into paroxysms of inexplicable merriment and a mishmash of half-remembered quotes - they had played an impromptu _Midsummer_ in that very bush a few years ago, with Teddy Kent and the hired boy. Dean knew it was petty to begrudge them their pleasant memory, but couldn't quite help himself from growing colder and more withdrawn, the longer they went on. There seemed no place for him inside their laughter.

"I'll come another time," he'd said stiffly, standing to go, and Emily – still rosy-cheeked with exertion and pleasure – had grabbed his hands.

"By all the vows that ever men have broke," she quoted Hermia gaily, "in number more than ever women spoke, in that same place thou hast appointed me; to-morrow truly will I meet with thee."

"Truly?" he'd said, softening. She could always soften him, especially in moonlight.

"Truly," she said, and gave him one of her slow elfin smiles.

He opened his eyes now in the deep green water, inhaling the humid, sulfurous air and allowing it to pull him back into reality. His lip curled. How much time he'd wasted on that mercurial child, that impossible fantasy.

He would go limping back to her in the blink of an eye if she crooked her finger at him.

And that, my lad, he thought, pulling himself heavily from the water, is precisely why you must stay away.

* * *

Next morning's breakfast was not quite the equal of the Parker House's, but it would do admirably if one was hungry, which Dean was. He helped himself to melon and prosciutto, piled olives and thinly sliced hard cheese on his plate, and tossed back the first life-giving mouthful of espresso. Gianluca was nowhere to be seen, which was perhaps just as well.

"Mr. Priest," said a crackly old voice, and Dean looked up to see a vaguely familiar face. The old man from the steamship, he thought, sleeping in that corner chair in the men's smoking lounge with one arm curved around his hat. He cast about in his brain for a name to go with the face.

"Sir Percy," he said after a split second, relief at avoiding a social _faux pas_ making him seem more effusive than he would have otherwise. "Please, join me."

"Thank you, young man. Don't mind if I do."

"What brings you to Tivoli?" Dean asked politely.

"Rheumatism," said Sir Percy. "You'll know a bit about that yourself, I daresay." He cracked the top of his soft-boiled egg expertly and scooped the semisolid yolk onto a slice of baguette. "No proper toast in this country," he said mournfully. "No kippers either."

"Do you often stay at this hotel?"

"It's better than most." Sir Percy ate his improvised toast soldier and sipped some tea. "I'm an invited guest at the Villa d'Este," he said, "only the railway strike delayed my travel by a few days. I hired a private boat in Naples and then took the train from Rome, and got in too late yesterday to present myself for dinner." He eyed Dean sharply. "You should come along with me, Priest," he said. "You're an artistic sort of person; the Cardinal will like you. He collects musicians and artists and people who can enthuse about his paintings and statues without sounding like bores. There'll be proper concerts there, not like that shipboard travesty. And if you haven't seen the old place you should. The frescoes have all been restored and they're a sight for the eyes."

"I don't wish to impose."

"Nonsense," said Sir Percy. "No imposition in the slightest. Be doing me a favor. I bring along a genuine music-lover, I'm off the hook for the concert and can focus on the wine." He winked at Dean. "Best cellar in Europe – it's why I accepted the invitation. Not to mention that it's cooler up here in the mountains. Didn't you find Rome beastly hot, still?"

"It's true," said Dean thoughtfully, "that I've never seen that villa, and by all accounts it's a marvel. And you're sure there's room for me?"

Sir Percy wheezed with laughter. "Damn place is the size of Buckingham Palace," he said. "You could barrack an army there and forget where you put them. No arguments, man, just come along like a good chap. The Cardinal is sending a car for us at ten."

* * *

He located a slightly puffy-looking Gianluca, paid him, retrieved his bag, and said his farewells.

"Come to Napoli again and find me any time," said Gianluca. "Perhaps you will need a driver in America; my cousin says the trains are not so good there." He grinned. "Adventure, it follows you, _signor_. I feel like if I follow you, too, exciting things will also happen to me."

Dean fought a smile and lost. "Would you not miss your family?"

"The family, I would miss," Gianluca said. "Not the fish. I would trade all the fish in the world for the chance to see one single cowboy!"

* * *

The Cardinal's limousine was bigger and more comfortable than Gianluca's two-seat Ceirano, and there was a liveried driver who took Dean's bag for him and stowed it with Sir Percy's trunks in the back. The October sky was blue and clear and the air pleasantly warm, and Dean felt loose-muscled and relaxed for once. This, he thought, is how everyone else feels, all the time.

The car stopped at the bottom of a hill, alongside a curved archway cut into a stone wall. Two young men in livery came forward to open the doors and take their bags. "Your first time, you said, Priest?" said Sir Percy. "Just step through that gate and take a long look."

There were no words, really, Dean thought. How could you tell someone who had never seen this what it was like?

Acres upon acres of what had once been manicured, geometrically spaced _parterres_ , now shaggy and slightly overgrown in a way that elevated their once-formal charm into a wildwood wonderland. Two enormous fountains, one on either side of the central walkway, each feeding a square pool faced in priceless Renaissance mosaics. On their far side, in the center of the garden, a wide shallow waterfall spilled into a massive round basin rimmed in stone benches and shaded with ancient trees; behind it rose a mountain backdrop that must have been artificial but looked for all the world like a hilltop in Mycenae.

Dean turned in a complete circle and caught the silver sparkle of water in motion from every direction. Statuary and carving were everywhere, in granite and marble and bronze: gods and nymphs and satyrs and fantastic beasts; benches and half-walls and tiny deep wells and bird-baths and circular love-seats built in and among the hardscape plants. Hanging vines and darkly looming trees, boxwood hedges grown taller than a man's head, through which birdsong and flowing water could be heard, dappled sunshine here and there glinting off ancient but still vibrant colored glass tile. Cobalt, emerald, carmine, gold.

He lifted his eyes and looked up, beyond the garden. There, there was the villa itself, nearly half a mile away, an imposing square behemoth of grey marble festooned with terraces.

"Quite a thing, eh, Priest?" said Sir Percy, shuffling up behind Dean and leaning on his shoulder. "A long walk, of course, and all up hill; that's the bad part, if you're as old as I am. But it's not hard to look at. No pumps, you know. More than fifty fountains and hundreds of jets, and they all run on gravity." He was wheezing a little, but his color was good – not too high. "They knew how to build to last, back then. Had to divert the river, of course. A bit hard on the town."

"I am not at all sure," Dean said, still openmouthed, "that I have ever seen a lovelier place."

"Well, let's see if you feel the same way after you've made the walk," said Sir Percy. "Rather like swimming the Channel, but you don't get as wet." He stabbed at the terra-cotta tiles with his walking stick and put a little more weight on Dean's arm. "There go the lads with the bags. If we take our time we'll be there just in time for luncheon."


	6. Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

* * *

Dean need not have worried about inconveniencing the Cardinal. The villa had been built in the 1500s to accommodate a full papal retainer of 250, not counting servants, and the present invited company – perhaps forty persons, forty-five at the most – rattled around in its cavernous, echoing rooms like grains of sand in a child's beach pail.

Luncheon was a buffet, from which the Cardinal's guests filled plates and then scattered terrace-ward. Dean could scarcely blame them. Lovely as the frescoes and mosaics inside were, the villa's true charms lay outside in the grounds.

"I am very sure," he wrote Isabella later that afternoon, "that you know all about this place and its contents, so I scarcely need describe them to you. I vacillate back and forth between being fascinated by the interior walls – Old Testament prophets, to Phoebus on his chariot, to a life-sized Renaissance hunt; you need only step through another door to find yourself in another universe – and being repulsed by them. Not a square inch of space is without its fleur-de-lis, its scallop, its tiny grinning imp-head … and all of it in vivid, shrieking color! Whereas one needs only to step out of doors to be soothed by a tone-on-tone palette of fresh growing green, underscored and punctuated by soft grey marble."

"I am not even disappointed that the water-organ above the central fountain is in disrepair and no longer makes music, impressive as its mechanical madrigals must have been. The simple play of water against stone is exquisite, just present enough to muffle passing voices into murmurs. A hundred conversations could take place in this garden at the same time, and each one would be completely private and contained."

"You may be amused to learn that at least two of your fellow New Englanders are presently in residence. The famous Mrs. Wharton is here as part of a tour she is making of Italian villa gardens, stalking about with her lantern jaw held a foot in front of the rest of her and scribbling notes; she is under contract to write a travel book and has a deadline to meet. She is such a formidable presence that one is hard-pressed to notice her illustrator, Mr. Parrish, though he is quite as well-known in his own right and is juggling sketchbooks to boot. He is quite as handsome as his pictures, all aquiline nose and cleft chin; it would be easy to dislike him for that alone, if he did not look so thin and unwell. I hear that he is recovering from a bout of tuberculosis, and that before he took this assignment he was in the deserts of Arizona for two years, drying the remains of the disease from his lungs."

"There is to be a _salon_ tonight in the famous Fountain Room. Sir Percy assures me that the Cardinal's musical guests are all of impeccable pedigree and peerless quality. Then again, Sir Percy disappeared upon arrival into the Cardinal's wine cellar and shows no signs of re-emerging, so it is difficult to know how seriously to weigh his artistic opinion. I would name the musicians for you, but I am not acquainted with the ones who are presently here, and I am told that more are arriving this afternoon."

"I am sure your reply to my last letter is waiting for me at the Villa Barbaro; the fault is mine in allowing myself to be so delayed. I have resolved to be in Venice at least by Carnival. That leaves me a bit more than two months, which seems ample even by my own slow standards … though at the rate I am going, we may very well meet in person in May before I have the chance to read your correspondence."

* * *

They dined on mountain trout and saddles of venison, with the usual Italian _accoutrements_ : spongy local cheeses, cured meat, vegetables both pickled and fresh, sunset platters of tomatoes drizzled with olive oil, bloomy purple grapes that changed color when Dean's fingers touched them. "Winter will soon be upon us," said Mrs. Wharton, looking flushed and self-satisfied with her afternoon of writing. "So let us raise a glass to the last bounty of summer!"

" _Facciamo un brindisi,"_ they agreed, and drank.

There were more ladies than gentlemen at dinner, so Dean was partnered on either side. He was more than a little relieved that the Countess Perényi was not seated near him. A Hungarian lady of a certain age, she had once met Dean on a short voyage from Varna to Sevastopol, and made it clear that she found his deformities sexually intriguing. He had discovered her in his stateroom, the first night they were at sea, and had nearly been forced to call a porter to have her removed.

Possibly, Dean thought, she had meant it innocently enough – she was not to know how insulting he found the prospect of being bedded on those terms, nor how often he had encountered like propositions before; there were a shocking number of bored married ladies among the idle rich who harbored a prurient curiosity about his twisted body, and assumed that he would be unusually, ah, _attentive_ , out of sheer gratitude for their interest. Still, he and the Countess now found it difficult to look one another in the eyes, when they happened to meet by chance.

Victor Hugo had a great deal to answer for.

Tonight's dinner companions did not seem likely to present the same difficulties. On his left sat a rising Russian ballerina named Pavlova who had just been elevated from the _corps de ballet_ to _danseuse_ at the Imperial Ballet; after Dean exhausted his few words of polite Russian and she her sentence or two of English, she turned and struck up a conversation with old Monsieur Petipa, her traveling companion and ballet master.

He had more luck conversing with the lady on his right, a thirteen-year-old British pianist whose teacher had engineered her invitation with the Cardinal. Her name was Julia, though she told Dean that she intended to be called by her middle name, Myra, once she was famous. She was in her first year on scholarship at the Royal Academy in London.

"I study with Tobias Matthay," she confided in Dean. "He has hardly any hair on his forehead, but his moustache is enormous. I think perhaps the moustache is sapping the strength from the rest of his head." She took a gulp of her grape cordial. "He is an expert in how the arm works. He is writing a book about it, and he says that I play more naturally when I perform than when I practice. So he has sent me away for a few weeks to travel and play some little bits of concerts, and not to think so much about how I am doing it."

"Have you had your début, Miss Hess?" Dean inquired. Myra shook her head.

"Not until I am seventeen, Maestro says. Not officially, anyway. That will be in London, with all my family there, and the writers from the newspapers."

"Do you enjoy performing?" Not all prodigies did, Dean knew.

She considered this. She was small and dark, with tiny hands and a sharp chin and great liquid eyes, and someone had dressed her in lace-trimmed white lawn, to make her seem even younger than she was. "I cannot listen while I do it," she said finally. "When I do, it is like I'm going to my own funeral. But if I can play and not be a judge in the back of my own head at the same time, it is very much like flying."

"I have often thought that reading is like flying," Dean said. "In the middle of a good book, the brain transcends the body and creates its own reality."

"Yes!" said Myra. "But … it is not exactly the same."

"Because your body is creating the sound?"

"No, that's not it," she said, frowning. "It is not the body that creates the sound, I don't think. I think it is the brain. The body just does as it's told." She grinned suddenly. "Except when it doesn't. Sometimes it has a mind of its own. Especially my left thumb; it always wants to thump."

"What will you play tonight?"

"I wanted to play Beethoven," said Myra. "He is my favorite. But tonight I am playing Franz Liszt, because Liszt stayed here in this house once upon a time and wrote two very famous pieces during his visit. So the Cardinal asked for him especially, because the other pianist who is here tonight, Mrs. Chaminade, only plays her own compositions."

"Ah," said Dean, and followed the direction of her glance to the head of the table. It was clear, he thought with amusement, that the Cardinal considered him a social wild card: rich but untitled, Canadian, physically deformed, and an unknown quantity in terms of witty conversation. Therefore, he was seated near the foot of the table, with the little-girl pianist and the minor ballerina, and Edith Wharton and Maxwell Parrish were at the other end with the titled Brits, an old Italian _principessa_ or two, the Countess and her elderly husband, and the more famous musicians – one of whom, apparently, was the wildly popular French composer Cécile Chaminade.

Madame Chaminade was somewhere in her mid-thirties, Dean guessed. One would never know, looking at her, that she was a performing sensation who inspired housewives in Brighton to form music-appreciation clubs bearing her name, nor that her sheet music sold like ice in August; she had soft, undefined features and sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, and wore a demure high-necked gown of cream-colored chiffon. She was leaning across the table to talk to another woman whose face was turned away so Dean couldn't see it – a milk-skinned woman in a dark green Reform-silhouette dress, with glossy chestnut braids twisted into a crown on top of her head.

Rosalind Lowell, Dean thought, recognizing the ink-stained forefinger, and was momentarily annoyed, even as he appreciated – from a purely aesthetic viewpoint – the creamy curve of her throat against the rich-hued gown. Was there anyone on the SS Vancouver who had _not_ followed him to Tivoli?

* * *

Dinner flowed into the cheese course, then to fruit and dessert and coffee. Finally a chime rang from the doorway, and the company – dazed from the _tiramisù_ , still clutching their brandies – filed into the Sala della Fontana. This was the villa's most celebrated room, frescoed over its entirety with scenes from mythology and still possessed of its original 16th-century fountain on the north wall. It was furnished for the occasion with upholstered furniture in small conversational groups, enough straight-backed chairs and music stands to accommodate a chamber orchestra, and a concert grand Pleyel piano with a shining walnut case, exquisitely carved about the legs and the music desk.

Sir Percy had been right about one thing, thought Dean. This concert was nothing like the one organized by Madame Lumber Magnate.

In place of Minnie-and-Margaret's butchered _Fledermaus_ , they heard a tenor and soprano from La Scala in Milan, singing the famous arias and celebrated duet from Donizetti's _L'elisir_ _d'amore_ with chamber-orchestra accompaniment. Instead of the anemic Clementi, there was tiny, precocious Myra Hess playing Liszt's plangent _Liebestraum_ with full, singing tone, crystalline fioratura, and a left thumb that did not thump. (The old Cardinal was electrified during this, his rheumy eyes alight with nostalgia and joy. Pledged to the Church he might be, thought Dean, but if this man truly worshiped anything, it was music.)

Miss Pavlova obliged them with a scene from _Coppélia_. She, too, was something out of the ordinary, Dean thought – most Russian ballerinas were short and muscular, with pyrotechnical power and lift, but she was willowy and languid; when she rose _en pointe_ he fancied that he could circle her almost-nonexistent ankles with a thumb and finger. Every movement was imbued with intention and melancholy and completely at one with the music in a way that was almost otherworldly in its fragility. He imagined her dancing _Sleeping Beauty_ and shivered.

Other performers followed: a pair of tumblers somersaulted through a comic routine, a British character actor declaimed a monologue from _King Lear._ Madame Chaminade took the piano bench and played her famous Scarf Dance. She was a different creature in performance, thought Dean: fiercely focused, her blandly pretty features sharpening with concentration into something very nearly approaching beauty. If she sang the way she played, he could begin to see how she had started a cult of personality around herself.

"I shall not sing my own songs tonight," she said after the applause died away, "but rather one written by my colleague, Mademoiselle Lowell, to a poem by Paul Verlaine."

 _Ah, yes_ , thought Dean, and leaned forward in his seat. _This should be interesting._


	7. Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN

* * *

Afterwards, he wished that he could remember what the music had sounded like.

Oh, it was beautiful, and Madame Chaminade had sung it well. But unlike other songs he'd heard – unlike, if he was honest with himself, what he had been expecting from cheerful Rosalind Lowell – the notes she'd written didn't so much announce themselves as a melody, as wind themselves sinuously around the poem, at once lifting it up and taking it over.

With the music, the poem became more than it had been without it, and even without that augmentation, it cut too closely to Dean's soul. He had never been able to read it aloud, and now – hearing it come at him with that searing, searching music attached to it – it was all he could do to stay in his seat.

It was in Verlaine's French, of course, but he knew the words so well that he scarcely had to translate:

 _It weeps in my heart_

 _like the rain upon the city._

 _What is this languor_

 _that penetrates my heart?_

 _Oh, sweet patter of the rain_

 _on the earth and on the rooftops –_

 _For a heart which is wearied,_

 _oh, the song of the rain!_

 _It weeps without cause_

 _in this disheartened heart._

 _What! No betrayal? …_

 _This weeping is without reason._

 _It is truly the worst pain_

 _not to know why –_

 _Without love, without hate –_

 _my heart knows so much pain._

Madame Chaminade sat down to applause. Dean beat his hands together, as was expected of him, but barely felt the impact. His face felt numb, his body leaden, and inside his chest his heart stuttered and raced.

The members of the little orchestra returned to their chairs; for a finale, the conductor announced, the concertmaster would perform the first movement of Lalo's _Symphonie espagnole._ They tuned; the concertmaster entered; the room filled with leaping, dancing violin. Beautiful, Dean thought distantly, but false – what passed for _flamenco_ in a Parisian concert hall. Virtuosic and lovely and meaningless.

It had been a mistake to accept this invitation. It had been a mistake to come here. It was a mistake to be in Italy at all.

How could he have thought that any of this would make the turmoil inside him more bearable? More to the point, if he had traversed half the world and still not left his heartache behind him – if a melancholy melody and a few words from a drunken French poet could rip off the scab that easily and make him bleed again – what use was it for him to go anywhere, or do anything?

Blind and raging and impotent, blood thundering the distant ocean of his own heartbeat into his ears, he waited out the end of the movement and the first wave of applause, conscious only that he was near the back of the room and that the terrace was so close that he could feel the cool draft of air from the doorway. The Cardinal was standing, Mrs. Wharton was standing, and now they were all on their feet, so he could be, too – and even as one of the old Italian princesses turned with a smile to ask him how he had enjoyed the performance, he was blundering away, a few steps, a few more, and then he was out into the night and away from all of them, all of it, everything except himself.

* * *

How far he walked, he wasn't sure. There were ramps to stumble down, and staircases, and arches and trellises and great carved blocks of stone in one formation or another, and hissing water all around him, and marble faces looming out of the dark that looked almost human in the moonlight, except for their pallor and their great size. As he got farther from the villa, the path grew rougher and the trees more overgrown. Several times he tripped on loose stones, and once would have fallen outright, except that he caught himself with his hands on the rough-hewn edge of a bench.

His breath was harsh and ragged in his own ears, sounding more animal than human. His face was wet.

He came to a stop, finally, in a wild part of the southwest corner of the garden. Another pool, another statue – this one a gigantic woman with a serene face and … were those multiple sets of breasts she was cupping in her hands? Dean did a double take and looked again. Yes – at least ten pairs, each one pouring water from its nipple.

"This is where I come when I want to be alone," said a cool female voice. "Find your own solitude, if you please."

Swiping at his streaming eyes with one sleeve, Dean turned, startled, to see Rosalind Lowell sitting on a bench a few meters away. "I'm sorry," he said, flustered. "I didn't know you were here. I wasn't following you. I'll go."

"Wait." She rose and came closer to him. "It is I who am sorry, Mr. Priest – I thought you were someone else. I didn't mean that bit of incivility for you." She peered at his face. "Are you … quite well?"

"Fine," he said shortly. "I apologize for bothering you."

"You've been weeping," said Rosalind, "your trousers are torn at the knee, and the palms of your hands – are they bleeding?" She took him by the wrist and turned his hand into the moonlight. "A bit. Some of the stones are rough – it can be perilous to walk in this part of the garden at night, if you don't know your way around. It hasn't been restored like the sections nearer the villa."

"Really, it's nothing," said Dean, mortified, but she pulled him down next to her on the bench and produced a handkerchief, which she dipped into the fountain.

"Hold still, do," she said. "It's not every man who can say his wounds have been soothed by water from the breasts of Diana of Ephesus."

He took a deep breath, scrabbling for the tattered remains of his equilibrium. "Is that who the lady is? I was wondering."

"Mm." She dabbed at the scrapes. "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair."

"Now the sun is laid to sleep," said Dean tentatively, and was encouraged by her lifted eyebrow of surprise. "Seated in thy silver chair, state in wonted manner keep –"

"Hesperus entreats thy light," Rosalind finished. "Goddess, excellently bright. How well-read you are, Mr. Priest."

"And you as well." He hesitated. "Your setting of the Verlaine—"

"Call it 'pretty' or 'charming' or 'clever'," said Rosalind warningly, "and our truce is over; I shall expel you from the grove of the Goddess, wounded or no." She let out a short, bitter laugh. "I slipped out early from the concert, just so I could avoid hearing any of those awful, well-meaning words; they are like paper cuts on the soul."

"Quite the contrary," said Dean. "I found it terribly upsetting." It must be the moonlight, he thought, that invites such intimacies; I could never bring myself to say this in one of those elegant sitting rooms.

"Upsetting?" she asked, her voice neutral. Dean nodded, and tried to swallow the rawness in his throat.

"Your music," he said, choosing his words with care, "illuminates the poem, the way a medieval monk dips his brush in gold to bring out a word he loves more than the others. And that poem scours at me until I bleed. I could scarcely bear to hear those words tonight."

"That is how I felt," said Rosalind, "the day I set it to music."

"Your music makes it … worse," said Dean. "More of what it already was. Too much."

"I will take that as a compliment."

They sat in silence. She was still holding his hand.

"Have you ever done anything truly terrible?" she asked him suddenly. "Not merely venal, not the small petty cruelties we expect of one another every day, but something really unforgivable, something that eats at you when you stop distracting yourself from it?"

"Yes," said Dean, thinking of the pile of ash that had once been Emily's novel. "Yes, of course. And you?"

"Yes," she said sadly. "Yes, of course."

"I am not Quasimodo," he said. Was there truth serum in Diana's pool? Why was he telling her this? "I do not love gently and from afar. I am not patient, and devoted, and grateful for the crumbs I am thrown. I am jealous and guarded and vengeful, and every word I speak has a sharpened edge." He kicked viciously at a pebble under his foot. "And I lose everything and everyone I love most, because I cannot hold them gently."

" _Il retaggio d'ogni uom m'è tolto,"_ Rosalind said softly, and Dean laughed.

"The inheritance of this mortal flesh is denied to me," he translated. "Yes, exactly. I am indeed a Rigoletto; I despise my imperfect body, I laugh because I want to weep, and even as I am surrounded with loveliness and luxury, I cannot help but dwell on the few things that I cannot have." He turned to her. "And you, Miss Rosalind Lowell: I know next to nothing of you or of what you want, but if you are as miserable as I, you hide it well. I would never in a hundred years have expected that song to come from your pen."

She was silent for a long time. "I am not miserable," she said. "Not really. Not most of the time. I am like you – I recognize my fortunate place in the world, and despise myself for wanting more than I have been given." She trailed the fingers of her free hand in the still water of the fountain. "You are seeing me in a moment of weakness. As I am seeing you."

"Tomorrow," suggested Dean, "we will have recovered ourselves."

"Precisely." She turned toward him, and Dean could see tears glittering on her eyelashes. "Might I ask a very great impertinence of you, Mr. Priest?"

He tensed, but forced himself not to react. "Of course."

"It is only that I am very lonely," she said. "And that our conversation tonight has revealed you to be a … a sympathetic spirit. If you have no objection, for only a moment, I should very much like to be – held."

* * *

He realized at once that this was nothing like the Countess Perényi's advances. Her eyes were wet, their irises almost transparent in the moonlight. He felt as though he could see all the way through her, so clear and direct was her gaze.

Perhaps she could see into him in the same way. It was that kind of night.

"Come along, then," he said, in an attempt to lighten the mood, and extended his arm so she could slide into the curve of his shoulder. An instant later, he was holding her.

Her gown was made of merino jersey in a fine weave, soft yet textured against his fingers. He could feel the heat of her body rising through it, and smell the ghosts of tuberoses in her hair. They were almost exactly the same height, but she curled into him and fitted her head on his shoulder, and it felt foreign and surreal and altogether wonderful.

We are accustomed, thought Dean, to think about women as if they are not quite made of flesh and blood. It is pleasant to be reminded that this is fallacy.

He let his fingers curve protectively around her upper arm. She sighed.

"I should be grateful for the _salons_ ," she said into his chest. "And for Cécile, who was kind enough to sing tonight even though neither the poem nor the music are really to her taste in the slightest; she did it only so that everyone there would hear my work. And even for the clumsy compliments, because most of them mean only to tell me that they liked it, and use the words they know are socially acceptable because the ones they are really thinking cannot be said aloud." She burrowed a little closer. "But I am not grateful. I cannot be."

"What is it," Dean asked, "that you want? The thing you cannot have?"

"I am allowed to compose," said Rosalind bitterly, "but not to publish."

"Ah," said Dean.

"I know that compared to many women, I seem to enjoy a great deal of autonomy," Rosalind said, "but my leash extends only so far. My father's words, not mine. I sailed from France to Boston expressly to plead my case in person, and this is the result; if I cannot be content with the freedom I have been granted thus far, I will cease to enjoy even that, and will be yanked back across the Atlantic to molder in the attic like Mrs. Rochester."

"Is he in good health, your father?"

She laughed against his chest. "Are you asking me if he is likely to die soon and give me unfettered access to my funds? You underestimate the Lowell patriarchy, sir. My trust then passes into the hands of his male heir – in this case, my older brother Paul. Unless I marry, in which case my husband is likely to abscond with it and use it to prop up his crumbling manor house."

"I take it Paul is not a patron of the arts?"

"Of the arts," said Rosalind. "Of his sister's involvement in them? No." She pushed slightly away from Dean and blew her tousled hair from her eyes. "I know full well I am no Mr. Debussy," she said. "But Paris is full of women who are writing, and writing _well_ , and having their music published and played. Cécile, for one. Auguste Holmès. Madame Viardot did it a generation ago, and ran her salon until she was a very old lady. It is more frustrating than I can express, to be so near to that revolution, and not add to it my own voice."

"A pseudonym?" Dean suggested. Rosalind shook her head.

"I know people who do that," she said. "Poldowski, for instance, is really Lady Dean Paul; she chooses to deny both her title and her gender in order to have her music judged fairly on its own merits. But what I write is mine, and I will claim it for myself."

"I will help you if I can," said Dean, surprised at himself. "What do you need?"

"Time," said Rosalind. "Patience. And, I suppose, a suitable husband, who has money of his own and is inclined to let me do as I please."

* * *

There was an awkward moment while she considered him, her eyes sharpened. Dean smiled sardonically.

"Suitable, my dear," he said gently. "I think we both know that I would never do – not for the flower of the Boston Lowells. But I will keep my eyes open as I travel."

"Thank you," said Rosalind, and kissed him.

It was meant to be a quick little butterfly-brush of thanks, Dean knew. Certainly it started out that way. But she was so warm and fragrant against him, flushed and pliant with recent tears, and his arms were half-closed around her to begin with; it was a matter of instinct to return the kiss, to accept another when she offered it, and then to give in, just for a moment, to the dark hungry voice inside him that said _deeper_ and _harder_ and _now, longer, more._

The heat took them both by surprise, and he knew that he was not the only one to feel it, because after some giddy unknown passage of time she was on top of him, half-straddling him, her hands threaded through his hair as her mouth slanted hard over his, and the only thing bringing him to his senses was the cold jut of marble in the small of his back as she pressed him back against the edge of the fountain.

She was warm and soft under his hands. There was no corset between them, only a layer or two of fabric. It would be so easy, Dean thought, so _easy_ ...

She made a single noise of protest as he pushed her back and away from him, then covered her mouth with her hand, horrified, and slid to the far end of the bench.

* * *

They stared at each other. Dean was the first to break the long silence.

"I hope to be in Venice by Carnival," he said finally, his voice shaking. "I am staying with the Curtises in the Villa Barbaro at San Marco, at the behest of Mrs. Gardner." He swallowed. "Do you know Mrs. Gardner? Do you know the Curtis family?"

Rosalind nodded. "Yes," she said faintly. "Yes, of course. Our families have been friendly for years."

"If anyone is able to intercede with your father on your behalf," Dean said, "it is they. And they are famous patrons of art and music, likely to be sympathetic to your cause."

"So they are." She wiped her hands on the skirt of her gown. Her lips were red and swollen, her eyes half-dazed. Dean felt himself pierced through with sheer carnal longing.

"Shall I arrange an invitation for you?" he asked, not quite able to meet her gaze. His laugh was shaky, but he managed one. "We will have two months in the interim. To – to recover our equilibrium."

Rosalind did not smile as she stood and shook out her skirts.

"I will need every moment of it," she said. "But – yes, Mr. Priest."

"Yes?"

"Yes," she repeated. "I thank you for the suggestion and am grateful for your assistance. And I will see you in Venice."

He tried not to watch her walk away, and did not quite succeed.


	8. Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT

* * *

Dean woke up in no mood for conversation.

He took breakfast in his room, found the Cardinal in the library to thank him for his hospitality and announce his imminent departure, and accepted the offer of a car and driver. An hour later, he was on the morning train to Florence. He felt relieved – almost jubilant – and yet slightly suspicious of how easily he had made his escape, like a sailor on shore leave after a long voyage, or a newly freed prisoner whose parole hearing had gone better than expected.

This was how it should have been from the beginning: a private sleeper compartment, a new translation of Ovid's _Tristia_ , and a complete lack of itinerary for the next two months. He slipped five _lire_ to the attendant for an extra pillow so he could prop up both his leg and his back comfortably and still enjoy the passing scenery. He had even thought to have the driver stop in the Tivoli market, on the way to the train station, so he could furnish himself with provisions - half a salami, a wedge of hard cheese and another of soft, a package of almonds, four pears, and a small stoppered bottle of the local _limoncello_ – so that if his book engaged him sufficiently, he would not have to stop reading to find the dining car.

The Ovid should have held him, but he could not bring himself to focus on it. Perhaps, Dean thought, he was no longer in the mood for exile and elegy. He laid it aside, after an hour of reading the same page over and over and still not absorbing it, in favor of Arthur Conan Doyle's newly published short story _, The Adventure of the Empty House._ He fared not much better with that.

"Holmes should have stayed dead," he said aloud, and ate some almonds even though he wasn't particularly hungry.

What had happened to him last night?

He poured himself a measure of limoncello, in direct defiance of all the rules of polite human conduct which decreed that one should not imbibe hard spirits before lunchtime, and forced himself to relive the events of the previous night, starting with the concert. That wonderful music, that floating sense of well-being. He had been so supremely content, before Madame Chaminade got up to sing and inflicted Paul Verlaine on him.

Perhaps, Dean considered, the song had not even been that good; perhaps he would have reacted just as extremely to the same text read aloud.

No, give the devil her due.

All right, he thought, so it was an effective bit of text setting, and he – teetering on the edge of heartbreak as it was, his defenses lowered to the ground by _Coppélia_ and Donizetti and _Liebestraum_ – had been rendered unusually receptive to its emotional suggestion. That explained his panicked exit from the salon, his involuntary tears, his blind careening through the night garden into the Grove of the Huntress.

Maybe it even explained what had happened after that.

What it did not explain, Dean thought, reaching for the limoncello again, was Rosalind's reaction to him.

There had been that whiff of flirtation, during the steamship crossing. Not so unusual: women flirted with Dean all the time, the same way they might a prepubescent boy of six or a silver-haired grandfather in a wheel-chair. He was, he thought viciously, _safe_.

He had rebuffed her then, attempted to redirect her attention to Sir Harold of the crumbling British manor house, and she had responded with levity and wit. A fine way to save face. Points to her.

But then, sitting by Diana's pool last night, he had thought their rapport a friendly one. She had touched him, but only to wash his scraped hands with water; she had smiled at him, but with none of the pity or, worse, prurient curiosity, that filled him with both aversion and self-loathing. Their conversation had been, if not exactly conventional, neither sexually provocative in the least. That Ben Jonson poem, lovely as it was, could be embroidered on a sampler and hung in a nursery.

And then she had kissed him, and reduced both of them to cinders. It was a wonder he had made it back through the garden to the villa; certainly he sat alone by Diana's pool for a long time after she had gone, body buzzing, brain blank with disbelief.

He tried to remember the last time he had kissed a woman, and came up only with a near-miss: Emily, in the moonlight near the Disappointed House, looking as though if he tried she would not push him away, looking indeed almost as if she might want him to. He had gone home, afterwards, full of both self-loathing because he had not pressed her, and cautious optimism for their next meeting.

Optimism had never served him very well.

But before that, before that. He sifted through his meager bank of sexual encounters – a few youthful affairs, before he grew wary of the motives of women too eager to see him naked; a steady string of attentive-but-disengaged paid companions – and arrived at the misty, indistinct childhood memory of a sweet-smelling woman in pale blue who had arranged the sheets at his shoulders, and caressed his cheek, and stooped to lay her lips on his forehead.

A governess, perhaps – they had come and gone, after his parents were dead. Or perhaps a neighbor, the mother of a friend. _Poor_ _little_ _thing_ , she'd said, thinking him asleep. He had lain in the dark after she turned out the light, burning with indignation but also half-mad for her to come back and smile at him again. Cool hands, kind eyes, smell of rosewater and lavender.

A knock at the door roused him from his rêverie.

"I have everything I need," he called from where he sat. "You needn't knock again before we reach Florence."

" _Per_ _favore_ , _signore_ ," someone said. A very young someone, from the sound of it; the voice was high-pitched and childish. " _Per_ _favore_ , _aprire_ _la_ _porta_."

Curious, Dean laid his cushions aside and crossed the few steps to the door. On the other side was a boy of about ten, dressed in neat but faded clothing. The toes of his shoes were wiped clean of dust, but he had forgotten about the backs. He carried a covered basket.

"Please, sir," he asked in Italian, "do you want a puppy?"

"I'm sorry, no," Dean said, attempting to close the door. The boy stuck his foot in the way.

"You only say that," he said, "because you haven't seen them. They are so pretty, and so well-behaved. My dog Chiara is the mother, and she is the best dog in the world."

"I'm sure they're very nice puppies," Dean said. At the other end of the corridor, a porter paused with a tray of empty plates on his arm to consider the situation and register the boy's presence. He and Dean made eye contact. "But I'm not interested. _Non_ _sono_ _interessato_."

"Please, _signor_ ," the boy pressed, undeterred. "My father says he will drown them if I do not find them homes today."

"Does he know you are on the train?"

"How else am I to find them good homes? Everyone in Tivoli has more dogs than they want already."

This, Dean thought, was probably true. "How did you get into the first-class car?" he asked. "Do you even have a ticket?"

The boy's eyes shifted guiltily from side to side. Behind him, the porter – having laid down his tray of empties – was advancing on them, with as much stealth as a man of his girth could muster.

Dean made a decision. Possibly, he thought, I am insane.

"Here, sir," he called to the porter. "My nephew needs a ticket."

The porter's eyes rounded comically. "Your … nephew, signor?"

"Indeed," Dean said crisply, and produced a banknote. " _Andate_ , _e_ _ritorna_ – he will be returning to Tivoli tonight."

The porter snatched the note adroitly from the air and made it disappear.

" _Allora_ ," he said. "I will alert the _controllore_. May I bring the _signor_ and his … nephew … some refreshment?"

Dean glanced down. The boy was very thin.

"Lemonade," he said, "and _panini_. And some _biscotti_ if you have them."

"Very good, signor."

The porter disappeared. Dean and the _ragazzo_ exchanged glances.

"Well," said Dean, holding open the door. "Are you coming in, or are you not?"

* * *

The boy's name was Paolo. He engulfed two sandwiches, trying not to let Dean see that he was saving bits of them in his napkin for the dogs.

"I'm still not interested in a puppy," said Dean. "But you had might as well let them out of the basket. They must be terribly restive by now."

"They are quiet, _signor_ ," protested Paolo. "My dog Chiara, she never barks unless a stranger comes to the door. And then she stops right away if you tell her to."

Dean, preparing to launch into a litany of reasons why a dog who barked at strangers would be a major impediment to international travel, saw two tiny long-nosed heads pop up from the rim of the basket, and was silenced.

"Why," he said, surprised into English, "they're Italian greyhounds."

" _Pardon_ , _signore_?"

" _Piccoli_ _levrieri_ ," Dean translated. "An ancient breed. Catherine the Great, who ruled Russia for thirty years, had her portrait painted with one. Its name was Zemire." He studied the puppies for a moment. One of them was scrabbling at the edge of the basket. The other puppy remained still, looking back at him with dark eyes that were huge and alien in its narrow face. "Your dog, Chiara. Is she a large dog?"

Paolo held his hands apart. The distance was about the span of his skinny waist. "She is smaller than my friend Marco's dog," he said. "Much smaller. She can almost walk under his belly. But she is a good hunter. She is fast, and good at killing rats."

Dean could not deny that he had, on occasion, traveled to places where a rat-killing dog would have been very useful. "I had a dog once," he said. "He had long golden hair and a very soft mouth. He was bred for swimming and for retrieving birds." He thought of Tweed and smiled. "He was very good company – though too big to accompany me when I traveled. He stayed with my sister during the winters, and let her children gnaw on him and pull his fur. A very patient dog."

Paolo, sensing an opportunity, swallowed the last of his lemonade and plucked the quieter puppy from the basket. "This one, _signor_ ," he said. "She is the smallest of the litter. See how she almost fits in one of my hands. She could go with you anywhere and be no trouble. She will sleep on your pillow, if you want her to." He held her out to Dean. "She likes you already," he said. "I can tell."

The puppy was the smoke-grey color that dog enthusiasts called 'blue', with subtle flecks of silver-white on her muzzle and chest. She had the long-legged, fine-boned look of an Egyptian cat deity; her fur was satin and sleek, but not dense, and she shivered in Dean's hands. Almost automatically, he drew her closer to warm her, and she snuggled against his chest with a tiny sigh of contentment. She felt impossibly fragile, all legs and heartbeat.

This is a bad idea, he thought. You are not just possibly insane, you are through the door of the madhouse and halfway to the padded cell. How do you expect to shepherd even your own broken self through Italy, much less this bird-boned little creature?

" _Quanto_ _è_?" he asked Paolo, and saw the boy's eyes shift again in momentary calculation, before he finally shrugged and shook his head.

"Free to a good home," he said. "I did not want to see her die. And you bought my ticket – the porter would have thrown me off at the next town otherwise." He paused. "And also lunch. It was a very good lunch."

Dean dug in his pocket for _lire_ and dropped a few coins into Paolo's palm. "The porter will let you stay on the train for the return trip," he said. "I will see to it. But you will need to buy dinner. And perhaps, if you arrive home with money, your father will see that there is value in the other little dog and not drown him."

The boy's eyes shimmered. " _Grazie_ , _signor_."

" _Prego_ ," said Dean, still cradling the puppy. She blinked sleepily against his palm. Her eyelashes were very long.

After the boy was gone, he carried her back with him to the bunk and propped up his leg again. "My pillows are my own," he said sternly to her. "Perhaps you were allowed certain liberties in Tivoli, but do not take me for a pushover, just because I could not bring myself to have you drowned."

The puppy curled into the curve of his elbow and snored delicately. She was very warm.

Dean picked up his Ovid and began to read.


	9. Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

* * *

He named the puppy Alba. She was the color of the sky just before it lightened with sunrise. And, like her namesake, she was an early riser. Dean liked to be woken gradually and at a civilized hour, preferably after someone else had already seen to the coffee, and was therefore dismayed when, at precisely five thirty-three on the first morning of their acquaintance, a narrow wet nose inserted itself into his ear canal and nudged – not hard, but repeatedly and inexorably. Time, declared the nose, was wasting.

Their hotel room was on the ground floor of the _albergo_ and faced the central courtyard. Dean belted himself sleepily into a dressing gown and carried Alba outside through the terrace doors, where she squatted politely behind a shrubbery. Dean, remembering Tweed's puppy days, praised her in a lavish undertone.

"Well," he said at last, scooping her up before she could get too interested in the little fishpond in the center of the courtyard, "shall we go back to bed?"

Alba declined this offer. A night's sleep had restored her energies; she tore around the room like a baby gazelle, leaping and cavorting and changing direction midair, her fragile front legs stiff with excitement. Eventually she fetched up against the door and fixed Dean with an imploring look, bat-ears folded back flat against her tiny skull, one silken paw lifted and drooping in mute appeal.

"We will need to find you a collar," Dean said, improvising with a pair of boot laces. "And I will warn you now, _ragazzina_ – as charming as you are, you need expect no civil conversation from me before breakfast. You will have to enjoy the mornings for the both of us."

* * *

They stopped in Florence two days longer than Dean had originally planned, strolling the low stone bridges over the Arno and idling at café tables. "I am writing this from the edge of the Piazza della Signoria," he wrote to Isabella on the final day of their stay. "The tourists have mostly deserted this square – it was almost chilly this morning, if you can believe it – and left it to the students, who sprawl across every available surface arguing with each other and swilling Aperol spritzes. But I can only see the great bonfires when I look out across its great expanse; the old cobblestones seem still stained by their soot. In the right light I fancy that I can smell smoke and see the ghostly slick of oil paint, running like blood into the gutter. Who knows what masterpieces were lost to us in that disaster?"

Alba, perched in the leather bag with the long cross-body shoulder strap that Dean had purchased expressly for her conveyance, distracted him from this macabre thought by commencing to delicately gnaw a button from the sleeve of his jacket. Dean rescued the button and distracted her with a bit of his panini crust. It would not keep her attention for long; he must finish the letter quickly.

"My new traveling companion and I are bound for Verona next," he wrote. " _Cook's_ is fairly dismissive of Shakespeare's favored city, advising that its best features can be seen in a single day, but having taken that quick tour some years ago, I find myself inclined to linger this time, at least through the end of the Filarmonico's November season. I have an old acquaintance there who specializes in short-term apartment rentals and gouges no more than can be expected, and he has found rooms for me a street away from the Piazza Brà, near the Castelvecchio."

Alba made another grab for the button. Dean twitched his sleeve out of her reach and scrawled the Verona address at the bottom of the page.

"I suppose," he said severely, flapping the page to dry it and folding it into its envelope, "that you think yourself very clever. Shall we put you on the ground again, and see if you have gotten any better at walking on the leash, rather than chewing it?"

She had not. Dean conceded that she was a bit young to walk on a leash, even if it was a cobweb-thin bit of buttery calfskin custom-made for her in the famous San Lorenzo leather market. He compromised by staying put at his table and allowing her to charge in joyous circles around his feet. Better that she tire herself out tonight, if such a thing was possible; tomorrow they would be on the train most of the day.

He had been worried about taking a puppy on another eight-hour train journey, but she was a good traveler – quiet, as Paolo had promised, tidy in her habits, and inclined to cuddle. Dean had resigned himself to a dogless existence post-Tweed because it had been hard on both of them to separate for months out of the year – and because he remembered how much energy a retriever puppy both expended and required. Alba seemed content with a quarter-hour's mad dash around the room, now and then, after which she curled herself into a small grey croissant, as near to him as she could get, and slept. Dean dropped a few coins into the hand of the likeliest-looking porter, who then arrived to walk her outside at the train's longest station pauses.

"When we arrive in Verona," he promised her, "we will find you a basket. And then—" shaking his finger in mock outrage – " _then_ , I shall reclaim my pillow."

* * *

He had originally thought to press on to Venice straightway from Florence. His unsettling encounter with Rosalind Lowell in the Tivoli gardens had changed his mind. Better, he thought, to stay off the beaten path until Carnival, to avoid the Curtises and the surrounding nebula of artists and musicians that constantly peopled the lovely rooms of the Villa Barbaro. And besides, he had not seen Fabrizio and Maddalena for years; it would be pleasant to catch up with old friends.

Fabrizio met them at the Porta Nuova train station – tall, dark-haired, with Italian good looks that passed for distinguished until he smiled and his face burst into homely good humor. "Dino!" he cried, and embraced them. Alba squeaked in protest.

"And who is this _piccola signorina_?" Fabrizio plucked her from her bag and held her up. "A souvenir from your journey? _Bella, bella, bellissima,_ you funny little thing, Maddalena will eat you up. Dino, it has been so long! Here, _allora_ , you may take your _cucciolo tenero_ , and I will carry your _valigie_. Dino, Dino, you are here at the perfect time; it is not so hot, and the Filarmonico is staging _Lucia di Lammermoor,_ it opens next week, and who do you think is the Lucia? My Maddalena, she is the leading lady of my heart, but also on the stage, and you shall see her in her triumph!"

Their conveyance was an open cart pulled by a pair of ponies, one light grey, the other dun. "Sole and Luna," Fabrizio said by way of introduction, slinging Dean's suitcases into the back of the cart. "Dino, Dino, life has been so good to us, has it not? But we have scarcely seen you since our wedding." He cast a glance at Dean's left hand. "But where is your ring, where is your bride? The last time you wrote, you said she was ill and you were staying in Canada to be near her."

"Ah—"

Fabrizio's eyes rounded in horror so palpable that it almost made Dean laugh. "Oh, Dino," he said sorrowfully, " _sono un idiota._ Did she not recover? And here I am, clumsy, pulling up old bad memories. _Mi dispiace, amico mio."_

Dean laughed. It was not, he thought with surprise, even very much effort. "She is well," he said lightly, pulling himself up onto the bench seat of the cart. "We decided that we would not suit, after all."

Fabrizio frowned. "But—" he began, then stopped himself with visible effort. "You do not want to talk about it," he said. "Ah, Dino, your heart is broken, I can see it. My friend, I am sorry."

"Italy is comforting me," Dean said, and Fabrizio brightened.

"Of course!" he said, slapping the reins over the backs of the ponies. "That is what she does, _Italia_. You, you who are so well-traveled, surely you know this, that this is the only place to live. The sun, the wine, the melons, the statues, the beautiful women, the pasta."

"In that order?" Dean inquired. Fabrizio laughed.

" _Ma no_ ," he said, clucking to the ponies. "The pasta, that should be much higher up on the list. Come now, I shall take you to Maddalena, and she will feed you a meal that will make you see God."

* * *

They were, Dean decided, the happiest musicians he had ever met.

He sat in the kitchen of their apartment – candlelit now, but sun-flooded during the day – ate figs and prosciutto and _bolognese_ , and marveled at them. Maddalena was lovely enough, small and plump, with dark curls down her back, but nothing about her said _diva_ to him; it was difficult to imagine her as the grief-maddened, blood-spattered Lucia. And affable Fabrizio went to the theater every day to sit at a piano or wave a baton; surely he was not so easy-going as this, in front of his orchestra?

They were married three years now, he thought. Three years, living together, working together every day, disagreeing no doubt as any couple did from time to time, and yet they billed and cooed and twittered at each other like newlyweds. He drank some more wine, watched Fabrizio kiss his wife's hand from across the table until she blushed, and wondered what it would really have been like, to live with Emily.

Say nothing of that, he thought. What would it have been like for her, to live with you?

Alba nudged his hand with the top of her bony little skull. He fed her a scrap of prosciutto, lost in rêverie.

"My friend, you are dreaming," said Fabrizio ruefully. "We have kept you so late, and on such a day of travel! It is selfish of us; we are starved for your company. Come, the apartment is only a few steps. I shall find you the key, and we will let you rest." He pushed back his chair and dropped a kiss on the top of Maddalena's head. "I will return to you," he murmured, "very soon."

* * *

They strolled together down the ancient marble-paneled street. It was nearly eleven o' clock, but the sidewalk tables were jammed with diners and drinkers; it had been a sunny day, and the stones still held some of the sun's warmth. "This place sounds like happiness," Dean said, mostly to himself, and Fabrizio bumped his arm in agreement.

"Why you ever go away from us," he said, "I will never understand. Here, here is the apartment. It is not large, but there is a great deal of sun, and the garden is a beautiful thing; it was planted a thousand years ago, and Signora Abruzzi, who has the opposite apartment on the other side of the courtyard, maintains it. There are only the two apartments who share the garden." He cut his eyes sideways at Dean. "She is a _strega vecchia,_ " he whispered, "for sure. And her old cat, it would eat your little dog and spit out her bones, so do not let her run unattended outside. But—" he winked—"there is a daughter. To look at her will make you glad that God invented women. Her name is Giuditta; she sings with the opera chorus."

"As usual," said Dean dryly, "you think of everything. But I am not in the mood to pursue women during this trip."

"This woman," said Fabrizio, "if she takes the thought into her head, may very well pursue you. She is a free spirit, Giuditta." He laughed and dropped a key into Dean's palm. "Dino, Dino," he said with affection. "To think that you are here, from so far away, to see Maddalena sing Lucia! My friend, the world is a wonderful place."

As for that, thought Dean, he was still making up his mind. Certainly, however, this apartment was wonderful, all moonlit shadows streaming in through the courtyard windows and cool travertine under his fingers every place he touched. He found his way into the bedroom, shucked his clothes, and let them – for just this once – lie where they fell. The bed was soft and newly made and smelled of sunshine and lavender. His head was fuzzy from the wine; he had drunk more than was usual for him.

"In the morning," he told Alba, "we shall see—"

He was asleep before he could finish the sentence.


	10. Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

* * *

He saw less of Fabrizio and Maddalena than he had thought he would; they were in technical rehearsal and run-throughs, out at the theater half the night, and resting during the day to conserve their energies. Similarly engaged, it seemed, was the toothsome Giuditta, though he did see her mother, old Signora Abruzzi, from time to time, pinching back plants in the stone parterres of the central courtyard and skimming fallen leaves from the fountain. Alba encountered the Abruzzis' cat – a lean, evil-eyed tabby with tattered ears – and survived with only a superficial scratch on the nose to show for it.

Dean was grateful not to be on a train. The air was crisp and autumnal – pleasantly warm under the sun, pleasantly cool at night. He bought a cheap panama hat from a tourist stall near the Porta Borsari and spent his mornings exploring the streets of the oldest part of the city, marveling at the finely chiseled pavers under his feet, quarried and laid the year that Christ was born, and lunching on figs and cheese from the market stalls in the Piazza Erbe. Most afternoons, he parked himself at an outdoor table in the quiet Piazza dei Signori under the elegant Renaissance façade of the Loggia del Consiglio, and drank icy, sweating aperol cocktails while Alba, freed from the leash, raced in dizzy joyful puppy-circles around the grave marble statue of Dante Alighieri.

If he were more ambitious, he would slog through _Inferno_ again, maybe not in translation this time. Instead, he chose to revisit _Paradise Lost,_ which he loved beyond all reason and read with the same repetitive veneration that his more devout relatives saved for _Pilgrim's Progress_ and the King James Bible. It was _Paradise Lost,_ truth be told, who was to blame for the most scurrilous and enduring rumor that blackened his reputation in Blair Water; as a young man in his twenties, he had unwisely confessed to an admiration for Milton's bitter, flawed, all-too-human Lucifer. By the time this had been passed around and come back to him, he was branded a devotee of devil worship, down to the cloven foot and the pentacle secretly branded on his hump.

"Idiots," Aunt Nancy Priest had said, and laughed. "A lot they know; you're the only one of us who will ever go to Heaven, Jarback, even if it's only because no one's ever invited you to sin."

But that was no matter now.

The last time he had read the Milton through had been aloud to Emily, two winters ago. Emily, pale and wasted, her foot wrapped, her thin body propped on pillows; Emily, hollow-eyed with the new and unwelcome knowledge of physical infirmity and betrayal. Dean had sat every afternoon with her, under the distrustful eyes of her suspicious aunts, and read into her ears those beautiful, half-heretical words. Now, he steeled himself against unwelcome memory and read them again, reclaiming them for himself alone.

 _Solitude sometimes is best society._

 _O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, that bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above my sphere._

 _Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss._

Dean closed the book and stood up. Alba, a hundred yards away on the far side of the statue, flung herself joyously through a kit of perturbed pigeons, scattering them aggrieved to the air, and arrowed toward him. She had an endearing way of racing up to him and inserting her sleek head into the cup of his palm. She did this now, and as always, it made him smile.

"No more dancing," he said to her, drawing a bill from his pocket and leaving it on the table for the waiter. "The Borsari is too crowded for you to walk without the leash. No, don't pull, piccola, you will strain your neck, and besides, it is not becoming of a lady."

They threaded their way through the market and back toward the old gate, stopping for a gelato from a street vendor. It was strawberry today – fragola in Italian, a word Dean loved because it made him think of fragrant, and truly it was, sweet and heady and almost overripe, the essence of summer in a paper cup. He dabbed a bit on Alba's nose and watched her lick it off. His head was full of words – he'd closed the book before his eyes could register them, but it didn't matter because he'd had them memorized for years:

 _How can I live without thee, how forgoe_

 _Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyned,_

 _To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?_

 _Should God create another Eve, and I_

 _Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee_

 _Would never from my heart; no no, I feel_

 _The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,_

 _Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State_

 _Mine shall never be parted, Bliss or Woe._

* * *

The night before _Lucia di Lammermoor_ opened at the Filarmonico, Fabrizio arrived at Dean's door at ten p.m. with a bottle of wine and two panini wrapped in newspaper.

"It is a dark night in the theater," he explained. "The singers, they must not sing, they must not talk. Maddalena, she must rest more than anyone else; she has been in bed for an hour already. But me, Dino, I have the conductor's nerves, the flutter in the belly, and cannot sleep, not yet. You will come out and talk with me? The cucciolo, she can come too. She will like this place."

They walked the block and a half to the Piazza Brà and stood in its green tree-shaded quiet, staring up at the jagged hulk of the Roman arena against the night sky. "It is so big," Fabrizio said, "and so old. Have you been inside?"

"No, not yet."

"Come. I will show you."

They went in one of the side entrances, through an ancient stone arch, and climbed the rough hand-hewn stairs – slowly, in Dean's case, though each step was wide enough that he could pull himself up before attempting the next. When they came out into the moonlight, they were halfway up the side of the coliseum; there was a broad path running all the way around that separated the upper banks of granite bench seats from the lower. They sat down on the lowest bench of the upper section and leaned back. The stone had absorbed the heat of the sun during the day and was still warm.

"It will seat twenty thousand people," Fabrizio said, expertly pulling the cork on the bottle with an opener from his pocket. "A marvel, is it not, Dino?"

"A marvel," Dean agreed. He was staring down into the vast central field, imagining troops of soldiers playing at war there. "Is it true that the Romans diverted the Adige and flooded it on purpose?" he asked. "So they could simulate water battles?"

Fabrizio shrugged. "So they say," he said, swigging from the bottle and handing it over to Dean. "But war, ancient history, pah. What a theater it would make!"

"For opera?"

"Why not? The acoustics are good. And even if there was a stage – there –" he waved toward one of the narrower ends of the big oval – "there would still be enough seating for all of the city." He sighed happily. "You could stage _Carmen_ with a real bullfight," he said. "Elephants for _Aida_. Imagine it! Verona would be the center of the universe for opera – there would be nothing else like it anywhere in the world."

"You would be at the mercy of the weather," Dean said. Fabrizio waved this away.

"Summer only, of course," he said. "The downbeat of the orchestra just at sunset. Music under the stars, Dino, with nothing to stop one from meeting the other. Surely the great composers would smile down on us from Heaven and approve."

Alba was nearly out of sight, a tiny intrepid figure trotting along the mezzanine walkway. Dean called to her, and she came galloping back. He rewarded her with a bit of _bresaola_ from his sandwich.

"And you," he teased Fabrizio, "in your white tie and tails, waving the baton."

"That is too big a dream for me," Fabrizio said, shaking his head. "I cannot even imagine."

They traded the bottle back and forth and ate their panini. Out on the street, Dean knew, the city had come out to dine and socialize. But the massive stone walls blocked out the sound of distant conversation and laughter; inside the arena, it was as quiet as a cathedral, lit only with moonlight and the occasional spark of a stray firefly, down on the ground level.

"It feels," he said, slightly lightheaded from the wine, "as if time is not passing here."

"Ah?"

"These stones," said Dean, "are here, as they were here a thousand years ago, and they have not changed." He shook a finger at the vast empty expanse of the arena. "And while we are inside them, we do not change either. We will go down those stairs and out onto the street, and the world will have moved on without us; we will be strangers in a strange land."

"This is impossible," said Fabrizio, emptying the bottle.

"How do you know?"

"Because I have my Maddalena," he said, "and she knows that I come here sometimes to look at the stars and dream of open-air opera. And if she wakes in the morning and I am not beside her, she will come and find me."

Dean laughed. "True enough," he said. "How fortunate you are, my friend."

"Love," said Fabrizio, "is a thing that I wish for you. You will not be complete without it."

"I loved," said Dean, "and it did not make me feel complete. It made me feel loneliness and hunger and, even more terribly, hope. And then it betrayed me, or I betrayed it, I am not always certain, and broke my heart. I am done with it."

"Love does not make you feel those things," said Fabrizio with authority, "if it is true love. You want the fire that warms, not the one that burns you up."

"Fire is the same fire whether it is large or small," countered Dean. Fabrizio shook his head.

"No," he said, throwing out an expansive hand. "No, I am quite sure of this. To say that all love is the same is to say that a wolf and a dog are the same." He held out the last crumb of his sandwich to Alba, who took it delicately from his fingers. "The wolf knows only its own hunger, so it takes what is offered and your hand with it," he said. "The dog, who loves, takes what you can offer and stays by your side, hoping that some day you will offer more."

Dean shook his head. "We are both too drunk to have this conversation," he said. "Nor do I think that any woman, even your long-suffering Maddalena, would thank you for comparing her to a dog."

Fabrizio laughed.

"I do not have the right words," he conceded. "But I know what I know, Dino. When you find the right one, she will bring you joy and not sorrow. And then you will understand that what you thought was love before was not that at all."

* * *

They lingered until the stones beneath them began to cool, then found their way down the winding stone steps and out onto the street.

"I think perhaps I will now sleep," said Fabrizio. He was weaving slightly as he walked. "Thank you, _mio fratello_ , for keeping me company. I will conduct tomorrow night with no fear of the claques or the critics, and I have you to thank for this." He paused by his door. "There is a ticket for you," he said, "in the box office. And after, there is a dinner for the cast. You will come?"

Dean hesitated, then nodded. "Of course," he said. "I would not miss it."

"Until tomorrow, then," Fabrizio said. " _Domani_."

" _Domani_."


	11. Chapter 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN

* * *

Dean woke up later than usual the next morning. Sun was streaming in at the windows. His head felt clogged and woolly and there was a sour taste in his mouth. That, he thought, would teach him to try and keep up with Fabrizio glass-for-glass.

Alba was not on the bed, nor did she come when he called her. When he managed to hoist himself to his feet and lurch into the kitchen, he discovered why: there was a small yellow puddle on the marble tile next to the closed terrace doors, and the parcel of garbage he had placed on a chair, ready to be taken out, had been surgically removed from its wrappings and redistributed across the open expanse of floor. Alba herself was behind a curtain in the corner, gnawing furtively on a rind of pancetta. When she saw him, she swallowed hastily, then flattened her ears in apology and raised one front paw so that it dangled pitifully from its fragile wrist.

"That would be more effective," Dean told her sternly, "if you did not have grease on your whiskers."

Alba whined.

"Yes," said Dean, "I am quite aware of my own culpability in the situation. If I had woken at a normal hour to let you out and feed you, you would not have had to fend for yourself." He fetched a broom from the corner and began to sweep up the mess. "You smell like the alley behind the Liverpool train station," he said, wrinkling his nose. "You must have rolled in the garbage before you ate it. I wonder: have you ever had a bath?"

* * *

It was fortunate, he thought, that she was small enough to fit in his wash-basin. He lathered her with his shaving-soap, poured a pitcher of tepid room-temperature water over her head to rinse her, and wrapped her in a towel. Wet, she felt more tiny than ever, a shivering baby chick just out of its egg. He tucked in the ends of the towel more firmly and carried her out to a bench in the sunny courtyard. She lay contentedly on his lap, belly up and paws waving, and closed her eyes as he rubbed her dry.

" _Buon giorno, signor_ ," said a low amused voice, and Dean looked up to see a woman leaning against a column on the other side of the courtyard. This, he thought, could only be Giuditta. She had sleepy dark eyes and tumbled black hair pulled over one shoulder, and was belted into a peacock-blue silk dressing gown that managed to reveal almost everything about her body while showing no skin at all. Her feet were bare.

" _Buon giorno_ ," he said, immediately wary. "I apologize for disturbing you, _signorina_."

"You don't bother me," said Giuditta, and advanced a few more steps into the courtyard. "What a strange little animal," she said, peering down at the blissful Alba. "Are you certain she is a dog? Old Pazzo, our cat, has killed bigger rats than her."

"You named your cat Pazzo?"

"Can you think of a better name for a cat?" Giuditta hoisted herself up to perch on the lip of a nearby stone planter; it was positioned just far enough away from his chosen bench for her to grip the bench's edge with her bare toes. "You are good fortune for me, _signor_ ," she said, smoothing the silk over her lap.

The side of her foot was brushing his thigh. Dean shifted to put an inch of space between them. "Oh?"

"For two years, I have sung here with the opera chorus," she said. "I was a soloist in Lugo, and thought this contract would be more advantageous. But I have been an understudy time and again, and never had so much as a single solo line to myself." She smiled and tossed her head. "And now, only a few weeks after the mysterious _inglese_ moves in next door, I wake up on opening night to discover that Bettina has fallen down and broken her ankle, and I am to sing the role of Alice."

She said 'Alice' in the Italian way, in three caressing syllables, and looked so genuinely pleased for a moment that Dean softened toward her. "Are you quite certain," he said dryly, " that you were not behind Bettina when she began to descend the stairs?"

Giuditta laughed, unrepentant. "Not this time," she said. "Another year, and it might have come to that." She reached up to pull her hair over her shoulder again, combing it with her fingers. "You are the very good friend of the _maestro_ and his little _prima donna_ ," she said. Her eyes were bright and assessing. "Did you really travel all the way to Italy to hear her sing? That is what they are saying, in the chorus."

"That, among other reasons," said Dean.

"How fortunate you are," Giuditta said, smiling, "to be able to cross the wide ocean only for this. No doubt our little production will pale in comparison to the great ones you have seen elsewhere." She tipped her head to one side, studying him. "Will you be at the opening performance tonight?"

"Yes."

" _Bene_ ," said Giuditta. "You will be my good-luck charm, I am sure of it."

Dean laughed shortly. "Believe what you like," he said, "but also believe this: I have never brought any woman good fortune yet."

Giuditta pointed her toes, unsettling the silk of her robe so that it shivered and slid to either side, revealing her shapely bare legs to the mid-thigh. Unhurriedly she reclaimed one side of her skirts, then the other, bunching them in her hands over her knees and holding Dean's gaze with her own when he would have flushed and looked away. "You are right," she said. "Good luck, pah. We make our own, do we not?"

She let her toes slip from the bench and parted her thighs slightly, so that as she let go of it the bright blue silk fell to outline the bulge of her mons against the edge of the planter. It was a practiced move, no doubt, but no less effective for that; the sight of her open and splayed against the stone, hands braced behind her to jut her breasts forward, hips upthrust through the thin fabric, brought up the tiny hairs on the back of Dean's neck.

She was beautifully made, he thought, as dispassionately as he could. Lovely, lush, carnal, not a straight line anywhere on her body. Unless you counted the one that led from her hand directly into his pocket, the minute he touched her.

"Good day, _signorina_ ," he said, standing up and drawing Alba into the crook of his arm. " _In bocca al lupo._ I hope this opportunity leads to many more roles for you."

She said nothing as he turned to go. The surprise in her dark eyes – just a flicker, quickly banked – gave him a perverse sense of bitter satisfaction.

* * *

Fabrizio had reserved a box for him at stage left and set a pair of opera glasses on the seat. Dean flipped them into position, after a false start or two – it had been a while – and turned them on the orchestra pit. He could practically count the hairs on the violin bows. The first oboist had a little surgical kit spread out on his knees and was painstakingly shaving a scant layer of cellulose from one edge of his reed with a wicked-looking straight-edged blade. One of the horn players had a marinara stain on his cuff and was dabbing at it with a wet handkerchief.

 _Lucia_ had never been Dean's favorite opera. The libretto, he felt, did not improve upon the Sir Walter Scott original. And he had not voluntarily read Scott in years, despite the teenage Emily's coaxing to the contrary. But it was satisfying to watch Fabrizio stride into view in the orchestra pit, dark hair waving, and bow under a wave of applause; when the baton lifted and swept down again and the music began, it was difficult not to think of that energy exchange as a particularly arcane form of alchemy.

The somber overture – minor key, throbbing foreshadowing in the timpani – gave way to a rousing soldiers' chorus. Dean recognized a handful of the choristers by face, and almost all the principal men by name. How closely knit they all were, he thought, how tied together their fortunes. Tonight the baritone was raging onstage about his sister's secret affections for the tenor; in two hours, he would be shoulder-to-shoulder with that same tenor, swilling pinot noir and shoveling in cheese noodles in perfect unison.

There were much worse ways to live.

The soldiers' chorus returned. There was more ranting about vengeance; the baritone shook his fist in the face of the bass playing the priest, who was pleading for peace. A high note, some applause, a cloud of light dust as the soldiers stampeded offstage and made the scenery tremble slightly.

And now, a scene change: a plucked harp, sweet strings. Dean leaned forward; Maddalena was about to make her entrance.

Ah, yes, there she was in a pale blue gown prettily trimmed with paste pearls and tatted lace, hurrying onstage to meet her lover the tenor, tiny and almost childlike next to Giuditta's taller, more voluptuous frame. At the sight of her, the audience burst into applause. Dean almost wished she would not sing; if she was not good, he would have to lie to Fabrizio later and insist that she had been, and he did not want to have to lie.

A few moments later, he relaxed into the knowledge that polite dissembling would be unnecessary. What a lovely sound, he thought, not large but perfectly balanced between warmth and incision, clarity and depth, and completely even throughout her range from bottom to top.

The first-act aria was silly, of course – a ghost story about the spirit living in the Ravenswood family pond – just an excuse for Giuditta-as-Alice to declare it a bad omen and beg Maddalena to abandon her forbidden tenor. But that tune in the _cavatina_ , that searching, seeking, lyrical tune. It made you believe – if not in the ghost, then certainly in Lucia herself. _I might look like a little girl_ , declared the tune, _but I am no man's pawn; I make my own decisions, and woe to anyone who thwarts me._

Giuditta's voice was good, too, Dean thought, and though he would have thought her ill-matched for the fearful-but-loyal role of Alice, she was making him believe her. The ill-fitting dress – made not for her but for the much larger Bettina – and a mousy, greying wig helped, no doubt; there was little in her look tonight to remind him of the siren she had been this morning, except for the smooth, plangent velvet of her voice, which she could not disguise.

Maddalena launched into the cabaletta of her aria – of course she would not abandon the tenor! she declared, in cascades of shimmering _roulades_ , and punctuated her resolve with a high D that brought down the house. Dean caught a glimpse of Fabrizio's face during the applause – radiant with happiness and pride – and had to swallow a sharp, ugly stab of pure envy.

How connected they were, these two.

The tenor, Edgardo, appeared to announce that he had to leave the country but would return to claim Lucia's hand in marriage. A duet ensued. Dean let the music wash over him – how lovely it was, in that soaring _bel canto_ way, lyricism without apparent effort. So different from modern operas – Italian _verismo_ , German _Sturm und Drang,_ heavy glottal stops, huge orchestras, shouting.

He thought of Giuditta wrapped in thin blue silk, offering her body to him in the morning sunlight, and imagined her in leading-lady roles that would suit her more than this one: a sinuous Dalila, a knife-wielding Carmen, a haughty, imperious Amneris. _We make our own good fortune, do we not?_

 _What I write is mine,_ said another voice in his head, _and I will claim it for myself._

Rosalind Lowell. The thought of her startled him so that he shifted violently in his seat and nearly stubbed his toe on the carved baseboard of his box. Where had she come from, and why was she intruding on his prurient mezzo fantasies?

Clear light-brown eyes, crystalline with unshed tears. A whiff of tuberose from her hair as she bent to dab at his wounded hands. The blood-heat of her rising through her jersey dress into his skin as he held her close to him. That _kiss_ …

Intermission. Not a moment too soon, Dean thought, and gulped the champagne brought to him with only a passing thought to that morning's wine-induced headache. Hair of the dog, nothing; Italy was turning him into a lush.

There was a tiny box of chocolates on the empty seat next to his. They were intended for him, he knew; the name on the box was from a confectionery two doors down from Fabrizio's apartment, and the two of them had been there together. He ate one, then another. Soft centers, one caramel, one coconut. The sweetness lingered on his tongue as Act Two began: an acrimonious baritone-soprano scene between Lucia and her brother, in which Enrico produced a forged letter proving Edgardo's infidelity.

Even in 1836 during the writing of _Lucia_ , the forged-letter plot device had been shopworn. Dean, however, found it more convincing than not. We are all, he thought, too willing to believe ourselves worthy of abandonment, and on the thinnest of precepts. We need only a few words of confirmation to prove our fears; is it likely that we will look too closely at the handwriting?

Arturo, Lucia's arranged bridegroom, arrived; the chorus, decked out in wedding finery, sang something cheerful. _Why is Lucia acting so strange?_ – the groom. _Her mother has just died_ – the brother. One signature on the wedding contract. Another signature, Maddalena drooping and half-supported by Giuditta as she lifted the pen to scrawl her name.

Commotion in the hall – the return of Edgardo! Dean watched him denounce Lucia, watched Maddalena – weighed down by what seemed half her weight in white satin – wobble and pitch sideways in her distress. Giuditta had not expected that; there was a moment in which she very nearly did not catch Maddalena's arm, and another of unguarded exasperation. He smiled and ate another chocolate. Praline.

The famous sextet began – the old priest, the plotting brother, the two tenors – both betrayed, but in different ways – sad, helpless Alice, and then Lucia, a tiny central figure in white who was more sacrificial lamb than ever, in the midst of the men who meant to profit from her allegiance. In the novel, Dean thought, she really had been powerless. Here, at least, she had her voice, soaring over the rest of the texture despite her small stature, her physical frailty, her grief.

We could have cast this in Blair Water, he thought, studying the stage. Only the casting of the central love triangle would have made sense, of course. But what else matters?

Emily, as Lucia. Teddy Kent, as the lover come back from across the water to claim her. Predictably, Dean thought with a grimace, his own role in the narrative was unsatisfactory; Arturo's longest solo moment in the whole opera was a mini-aria of less than a minute, embedded in the beginning of the wedding scene.

That had been their summer, he thought, his moment of happiness and expectation, before the real hero appeared to sweep the leading lady away. He tensed in his seat, waiting for the habitual wave of grief and resignation to overtake him.

Instead, there were only the twining origami lines of the great sextet. Dean found his gaze drawn to Lucia, her white dress with its long train like a drooping pale flower among the black stems of the men. She had a look on her face that he thought could probably only be achieved in opera, profoundly sorrowful and yet somehow exultant. Raimondo and Enrico hedged her in, the chorus ranged murmuring behind her, Alice in her grey dress clutched her hand, and she bloomed on the stage like a hothouse lily.

The music wrapped him in its golden arms. Below him, Fabrizio's face shone with exertion and joy and razor-sharp concentration. He was not looking at his score, Dean saw; he had not turned a page since the beginning of the wedding scene. His eyes were fixed on Maddalena, and it seemed that his feeling for her flowed through his arm and out through his baton and was picked up and amplified by the orchestra. How else could a piece so full of tension and heartbreak, Dean thought, feel to him so suffused with love?

The sextet cadenced – a perfect, chillingly despairing high note from Maddalena – absolute stillness onstage. The audience, stunned into silence, let Fabrizio conduct into the recitative without breaking the moment with applause.

 _Did you sign the contract?_ – demanded Edgardo of Lucia.

Lucia, in despair – _Yes_.

Edgardo – _You have betrayed both Heaven and Love. May God destroy you!_

The chorus erupted into the second-act finale. Dean watched Maddalena crumple forward into a center-stage faint as the tenor stormed offstage, and reached thoughtfully for the chocolate-box.

Well, he thought, at least Emily and I didn't come to swords and curses. It seems that there are some advantages, after all, to being Canadian.

It was the first time he'd managed to make a joke about the situation. By way of celebration, he ate his final chocolate. It was nougat.

The lights went on, and the curtains at the back of his box twitched open. "Champagne, signor?" said the attendant with the tray of glasses.

Dean took one.


	12. Chapter 12

CHAPTER TWELVE

The cast party was less riotous than Dean had imagined it would be, perhaps because it was so late. The intermission between acts in Italy was long enough to go away, eat dinner, and come back, and after the final act, the curtain calls went on for what seemed like an hour. The flowers, the bows, the receiving lines, the strangely empty interval during which the singers vanished back into their dressing rooms to hang their costumes and scrape off the grease paint: all this ritual was fascinating, but Dean wished with all his heart that he had not agreed to go out with them afterwards.

"Alba," he said to Fabrizio in a tone meant to imply warning, but Fabrizio only waved at him and laughed.

"Go," he said, "go and see to her, and then come back. We will still be here!"

He dawdled as much as he dared, but even so they were still on the _antipasto_ course when he slipped through the curtained door into the big back room of the _ristorante_. Fabrizio waved to him and slapped the seat of a conspicuously empty chair. Maddalena, face scrubbed pink but with a few stray specks of stage blood still in her pulled-back hair, poured him a glass of wine.

"You were wonderful," he said to her, and she blushed. Fabrizio slapped him on the back.

"I told you. Did I not tell you? Did I not? All the _bravissimi_ , all the cheering! She will be singing Lucia everywhere in the world, my Maddalena. Milano, Venezia, Roma."

Dean doubted this. Her voice was lovely, yes, and she had raised the hairs on the back of his neck with the famous Mad Scene – the knife, the bloodstains, the eerie, iconic cadenza in thirds with the invisible voice of the flute – but she would be lost in a bigger house, with a less sympathetic conductor. Still, he nodded and smiled and drank the wine and ate a little of everything from the mountains of food on the table: ruffled arugula dressed with olive oil and anchovies, roasted baby eggplants stuffed with parmesan breadcrumbs and wrapped in local bacon, cold pickled vegetables, baked fish, chickens with crisp, herb-crusted skins, hand-rolled pasta in a thin green oily sauce that tasted like the ascended souls of all the garlic that had ever grown.

The singers and orchestra were cheerful and bright-eyed with adrenaline, but not loud. They ate with the same quiet, voracious economy that Dean had observed in bricklayers and farmhands; music might look effortless from the audience seats, but behind the footlights it was hard physical work. There was an air of expectancy in the room that he did not understand until nearly two in the morning, when the curtain parted and Alberto – who had a friend in the local newspaper office – rushed in with an early proof of the review. Fabrizio accepted the slip of paper, hands trembling only very slightly, and read it aloud to the hushed assembly.

Dean caught only bits and pieces of it – his conversational Italian did not encompass technical theater terms – but he understood enough to know that _Lucia_ was an official triumph; there were gasps and stifled cheers after nearly every sentence. Maddalena was "shimmering … _brilliante_ … _ravvisante_." The tenor: " _eroico_." Fabrizio and the orchestra: "masterful … colorful … _magnifico_."

Dean – as familiar with Italian bureaucracy as any tourist could be, at this point in his journey – was all but certain that such glowing epistles did not flow from the reviewer's pen without it being first greased with lavish applications of bribe money. Still, the cast was gratified; an air of relief had descended on the room, and now that the formality of the reading was finished, the party began to dissolve, napkins draped over plates, chairs pushed back, sated and happy and bound for their beds.

Dean waved goodnight to the beaming Fabrizio and excused himself. It was quiet out on the street, the outdoor tables of the cafés he passed empty and wiped clean, the lamps extinguished. The Adige was only a few steps away, and now that the streets were empty of humanity and its attendant odors, he could smell the river: aquatic, ozonic, very faintly fishy. He paused a moment, making a decision, then continued past the turn to his apartment and toward the Castelvecchio bridge.

"Are you not tired at all, _signor_ _Inglese_?" said a voice from the shadows. As its owner emerged into the light, Dean saw that it was Giuditta, scrubbed clean of stage makeup but still flushed in the face and with a high bright glitter in her dark eyes.

 _Danger_ , he thought. _Proceed cautiously._

"I am very tired," he said. "But I have been sitting in one place too long tonight."

"Ah?"

He gestured toward his bad leg. "The muscles cramp," he said. "If I do not walk a while before I go to sleep tonight, I will be in pain tomorrow and very likely crippled."

"Such a price you pay for the pleasures of music," said Giuditta, and fell into step with him. "Well then, _signor_ , by all means, let us walk."

"Are you not tired, _signorina_?"

"I am," she said, shooting him a sideways glance. "But if I go to bed, the day will be over. And I am not ready yet for that to happen."

"Ah yes," he said, "your star turn. I heard you sing Alice and immediately pictured you in other, better rôles. Was the reviewer kind to you as well?"

Giuditta laughed. "Were the reviewer unkind to all others," she said, "he would still have been kind to me. I made sure of that this afternoon." Her pace was naturally quicker than Dean's; she gave into it for a moment and skipped ahead of him, then turned the step into a pirouette. "But yes, the review was everything I could have wished for, in so small a part. See, here, there are three copies in my bag. One for my mother, one to paste into the book, and one to take out and read whenever I am in need of an encouraging word."

"What will come next for you?" asked Dean. Giuditta shrugged.

"In this business, there are no guarantees," she said. "But we move from _Lucia_ to _Le nozze di Figaro_ next, and Bettina's ankle is still broken."

"Will you be the Cherubino?"

"Signor," said Giuditta reprovingly. "Our costumer is very fine, but she is not a genius. And she would have to be, to turn this—" she outlined the shape of her own body with her hands – "into a teenaged boy."

Dean laughed. "Marcellina, then."

"Yes," said Giuditta, not sounding particularly happy about it. "Another old woman. But a funny one, at least."

"And for the end of the season?"

"Ah," said Giuditta. "Fabrizio, he is a modern man, for a conductor. A living composer at last; we will do Signor Puccini's new Japanese tragedy, and only two years after it was in Milan."

" _Madama Butterfly_?" Dean frowned. "I would not think that Butterfly would flatter Maddalena's voice."

"No," said Giuditta, "it is too heavy a rôle for her; she cannot carry it. But then, she will be carrying something else by then."

"Oh?" said Dean. Giuditta lifted one shoulder in a shrug.

"They have said nothing to anyone, but there are no secrets in the theater," she said. "It is all over the troupe that her gown had to be let out two inches in the waist for _Lucia_. She will have to sing Susanna in a forgiving costume and a firm corset – but like I said, our costumer is very good." She smirked. "By the end of the spring, her condition will be plain even in a kimono. Not that I care; Bettina's ankle will be better by then, and she can have the rôle of Suzuki with my blessing."

"Allow me to guess," said Dean. "Another old woman?"

Giuditta rolled her eyes. "Another old woman, sì."

They had reached the Ponte Castelvecchio, with its brick walls and craggy Old World parapets. The built-in benches at the halfway point were empty. Dean gestured to Giuditta to sit, then sank down himself and carefully straightened his leg to maximum extension. The muscle protested for a moment and tried to cramp, then – thankfully – acquiesced. He should be fine tomorrow, Dean thought, and rolled his shoulders to loosen them.

"You have not said," Giuditta prompted, "that you are happy for your friends."

"Oh," said Dean. "Of course I am happy for them."

"Are you really?"

His tightest shoulder, the one opposite the bad leg, released with a muffled crack. Dean felt the point of light at his temple that would have grown into a migraine by morning pop and dissipate. "Yes," he said, too tired to dissemble. "But I am jealous as well, I suppose. At this time last year, I presumed that by now I would be married myself, and as you can see, that did not occur. It is heartening to see that true love exists in the world. I just wish that it would happen to me."

"Who is this girl who did not want to marry you?"

Dean thought about this for a moment, then laughed. "Imagine that you are the girl," he said. "How could you be described in the space of a single sentence?" He let his head fall back against the ancient stones. "It does not matter who she is," he said, "only that I am nothing to her any more, and she is nothing to me."

"She is not nothing to you," objected Giuditta. "If she were, you would not be so uninterested in me."

Dean laughed. "Now we know it is too late to be awake," he said, "for we are beginning to tell the truth to one another. Very well – shall I tell some to you?"

"Will I like it?"

"Probably not." He flexed his knee again. "My body is twisted and imperfect, so I am at a natural disadvantage in this world; my infirmity is ever being used as a tool to manipulate me. Women like you see me and assume that I am desperate for any kind word or touch."

"Are we not all desperate for kindness?" said Giuditta. "Do we not all need soft words?"

"I am an idealist," said Dean as though she had not spoken, "which I admit is unfortunate. I can take no comfort from the action if I mistrust its motive."

One lock of dark hair, slightly lank from its long captivity under the theatrical wig but still soft and shining, had fallen forward to lie against her cheek. Dean reached out to lift and tuck it behind her ear, careful not to touch her satin skin with his fingers.

" _Verità, signorina_ ," he said softly, his lips scant inches from hers. "Let me hear your truth in trade for mine. Would you pursue me thus, were I not a wealthy man?"

Giuditta laughed. "What silly questions you _inglesi_ ask," she said. "You had might as well ask yourself if you would desire me, were I not beautiful." One dark eyebrow rose. "I presume that your infirmity does not extend to your eyesight? The girl you loved, was she not beautiful too?"

"It does not, and she most definitely was," said Dean tightly. "I confess that I am as bewitched by beauty as any other man. But—"

"— _Ma_ ," said Giuditta, mocking him. " _Ma, ma, ma._ What good does it do to dwell on what might be, or what is not, when one needs only to act on what is?"

" _Come sei pragmatico_ ," said Dean, smiling in spite of himself; "such a pragmatist. I would be a happier man if I thought more like you, _signorina_."

"What stops you?"

"To exchange one kind of currency for another is a cold transaction."

"A cold transaction that ends in a warm bed cannot be so very cold, can it?"

"I seek a deeper connection than can be achieved anatomically," Dean said, struggling to his feet. "And were you older and wiser, _signorina_ , so would you as well. All the money in the world cannot shelter you from indifference or brutality." He took a moment to gain his balance, then turned back and extended his hand to help her rise. She hesitated a moment, then accepted it. The look on her face was half-thoughtful, half-mutinous.

"Tell me something about her," she said after a block or two of silence. Dean – half-hypnotized by the warm velvety darkness and the sound of softly flowing water from the river – looked at her, surprised. He had a scrap of the sextet stuck in his head, and was trying to remember how it cadenced.

"Who?"

"The woman with whom you feel the _collagamento profondo_. Is she pale, with yellow hair?"

"Pale," said Dean, still distracted, "but dark hair."

"Black, like mine?"

"Brighter than that," he said, only half-hearing the words he spoke. "Like autumn leaves when they've just fallen. And eyes the same."

"Is she a society woman?" Giuditta demanded. "Droopy, useless, rich?"

"Rich enough, but not a bit useless," Dean said. He felt like a sleepwalker, or a zealot caught up in religious glossolalia; he could hear himself speaking, but as if from a distance, or underwater. "Merry and bright-eyed, with a soft mouth that quirks up at the corner when something amuses her. If she is in pain, no one knows it or can guess; she sends it into her writing."

"She writes books?"

"Not books," Dean said. The sextet was completely forgotten, and his head was clearer. He tasted the words as he said them, and was surprised by how easily they tumbled off his lips into the dark. How long had they been incubating inside him, waiting to be given voice? "Music. She turns poetry into songs. Her hands are stained with ink. And her hair smells like tuberose, which in the language of perfumes means 'dangerous pleasure.'"

Unable to stop the tide of speech, he huffed out a little self-deprecating laugh. "She wears loose dresses in dark rich colors, and her skin glows like stretched opal against them. She wanders alone in gardens at night and communes with goddesses. She quotes Elizabethan poetry and bandages the hands of the wounded and rages against injustice under the moonlight."

He paused to take a breath. His pulse raced. Bubbling in his throat were more intimate descriptors that were better left unspoken. _Her skin is so soft, the blood beneath it so hot. Her waist is small and her hips flare out from it like a Grecian amphora, and I know this because I felt her with my hands over her clothes while she pressed herself against me and moaned into my open mouth. She is silk and fire and honey and the aurora borealis in a summer sky, and I should regret this hopeless knowledge but I do not, I cannot, I will not, even if she is for someone else and not for me._

They were both quiet until they reached the apartment building. At the door, a much-subdued Giuditta pulled her hand from the crook of his arm.

"You have given me much to think about, _signor_ ," she said. "And in return, I have this for you."

She drew a letter from the pocket of her dress. Dean stared at it.

"It came a week ago, but the apartment number was smudged on the envelope and it was delivered to my mother. She gave it to me to give to you." She lifted her chin in defiance. "I have been deciding whether or not you should have it."

It was too dark to read the return address. Dean took the envelope. It was thick heavy paper, and he could feel where the metal nib of the pen had embossed it. "Thank you," he said. "It is the first letter I have received since beginning my journey. I would have been sorry to miss it."

"If it is from the woman," Giuditta said, "I think it will say that she wants you to come back to her." She paused, looking as if she might want to say something else, then shook her head impatiently, turned on her heel, and disappeared into the Abruzzi apartment. Dean unlocked his own door, scooped up a frantically happy Alba, and carried her over to the kitchen table to trim the old-fashioned Carcel lamp.

"Yes," he said to the squirming Alba, "yes, I am terrible for leaving you so long. Yes, you are an angel to forgive me so readily. Yes, I will let you into the courtyard if you promise not to bark. No, it is not necessary to lick my face."

She slid through his hands and out through the courtyard doors. Dean turned the wick a little higher on the lamp.

The letter was from Isabella:

 _Have no idea if this will find you at your Verona apartments, the state of the Italian post being what it is. Boston is altogether too cold and damp and the boys want to take me to one of those ghastly Floridian resorts, as though I were an old woman, so I can no longer delay my departure until May despite earlier intentions. Have made the necessary arrangements with the Curtises and expect to arrive at the Barbaro before Christmas. How lovely it would be to spend the holidays with you there. I am assured that there is a room for you and your little dog, too, and that you are welcome to stay all the winter through, should you take a fancy to the place._

Dean grinned and read on.

 _As for the Lowell clan: there are a boatload of Johns, they own most of Brookline, taken collectively, and it's hard to keep them straight, as they're all barristers and judges. No doubt I do business with at least one of them. Rosalind I haven't seen since before she left for Paris the first time, but if she's an artistic child I have no doubt that she's being pressured to settle down and contribute a scion or two to the dynasty. The Curtises have of course welcomed her – you have no idea how many rooms are in that palazzo – but I reserve the right to grant or deny my support until I hear what the music sounds like._

 _No need to write back, as by the time you receive this I will be en route. Safe travels to you._

 _Fondly, Isabella_

Alba dashed back inside, ears flattened and tail whipping, and jumped up to plant her front paws on Dean's knee. They were wet; she had been playing in the fountain. He scooped her up and rubbed the velvety spot between her ears.

"Say goodbye to this place," he murmured. "It's time to pack up and move on, _piccolina_. The universe has spoken: we're being summoned to Venice."


End file.
